WEB EXCLUSIVE

Disclaimer: This column is in no way intended to be offensive to any living organism on this planet. I love humans and potatoes.

Potatoes. The carbohydrate-laden, imperfectly imperfect, brown vegetable that elicits happiness in nearly everyone that consumes it. How so? People across the globe harness this product in their respective, unique ways: fast food restaurants chop and fry them, your grandma bakes pies of them, manufacturers add salt and vinegar to crisp wafers of them. We stand united. By potatoes.

For me, potatoes are a defense mechanism to overcome anxiety. As someone who falls victim to the cycle of body and intellectual shaming, I utilize potatoes as a medium of self-expression. Brown? Check. Lumpy? Check. Imperfect? Check. They are the epitome of visual gore, yet they are also the epitome of gustatory satisfaction. Heck, I even wrote my college essay on potatoes (which may or may not work out to my advantage. We shall see.).

Is my reliance on potatoes as a means of coping with image issues a societal trend? Is this trend positive or negative? Do we teenagers simply resort to inanimate objects for comparison to lessen the effect of our unhappiness and stress? Perhaps. Walking through the halls of school, I hear students say such things as: “I’m actually a marshmallow, not a human,” “I resemble a tomato more than I resemble my Mom.” (I have actually heard these.) Will I eventually “mature” (as my disappointed Mother would say) and learn to grow (pun intended) out of my obsession over potatoes? Probably.

But, by utilizing this mechanism, this device as a means to cope with life’s stresses, both in consumption and in figurative form, I have learned to give light to dense and dark situations. Instead of a negative connation, as couch potatoes typically have, the metaphor I have constructed as a figment of my imagination is actually an incredibly powerful positive message: Be potato.