HHS

Chris Voigt lost 21 pounds and improved his health by living on a potato-only diet for 60 days.  Potatoes are more nutritious than other starchy foods like rice and bread, and “are a good source of vitamins.”  They have a lot of vitamin C (much more than a banana or an apple), and potassium levels slightly higher than potassium-rich bananas).

But the Obama administration, which does not understand nutrition, has banned white potatoes from the WIC program (for school lunches and poor mothers), based on the false belief that potatoes are unhealthy.  (Yet critics of the Obama administration’s food nannyism get lectures from liberal journalists.)

Potatoes are critically important in providing the poor with cheap, nutritious food.  As Voigt notes,”In 2008, the United Nations declared it to be the ‘Year of the Potato’. This was done to bring attention to the fact that the potato is one of the most efficient crops for developing nations to grow, as a way of delivering a high level of nutrition to growing populations, with fewer needed resources than other traditional crops. In the summer of 2010, China approved new government policies that positioned the potato as the key crop to feed its growing population.”

After they were brought from America to Europe, potatoes “rescued the Western World” from recurrent famines, and made the Industrial Revolution possible.  They did this by radically increasing the amount of food that hungry peasants could grow per acre, and by enabling farmers to provide the agricultural surplus that would feed burgeoning industrial populations.

In addition to trying to take away poor people’s potatoes, the Obama administration has pushed ethanol subsidies that turn food into fuel and contribute to a “global food crisis” by spawning famines overseas.  The Obama administration is also using federal funds to subsidize the opening of an International House of Pancakes in Washington, D.C., and the development of high-calorie foods that benefit politically connected agribusinesses.