| Notes: Minor shelf wear, binding tight, pages clean and unmarked. How many veggies have become cultural icons? Have in-spired toys, games and gear? Have run for elective office, been featured on license plates, helped get out the vote, and participat-ed in anti-smoking campaigns? Have starred in several Hollywood smash hit flicks? Just one. The powerful potato. Take a good look at a potato sometime. We identify with that knob-bly, down home familiarity, that "potato head" there for all to see. Eyes, eyebrows, a top and a bottom. Well over 1,000 years ago, the native people of the Andes were molding po-tato faces into their ceremonial ceramic pots. In 2016 a character in an episode of the animated tv series "Bob's Burgers" zeroed in on a potato that looked like her long gone dad. And she wouldn't let go. Why? Because we are the potato, the potato is us, whether pink, white, tan, yellow or brown. We invite you to explore this illustrated history of the veggie that looks like us. The potato head. Meredith Sayles Hughes and Tom Hughes are the couple behind the world's first Potato Museum, and The Food Museum Online. The museums research, collect, preserve, exhibit and explain the history and social significance of the world's foods, and bring artifacts and programs to audiences of all ages. The Hugheses are pioneers in exhibiting food history, as curators of major exhibitions at the Smithsonian, the United States Botan-ic Garden in Washington, DC , and Canada's National Museum of Science and Industry. |