I worry sometimes about writing, about the fact that this magazine does not have a sound track and the pictures don’t move. I wonder how we can compete. I know, for instance, that a well-made motion picture can overwhelm you in a way that this story won’t. I know I cannot command your emotions in the way that, say, Tchaikovsky can; or Conway Twitty.
I worry about this especially when the subject is not as compelling as it might be. I’m worried right now.
This story is about potatoes.
Potatoes, sadly, do not lend themselves to greatness. They are the peasants, not the royalty of the vegetable kingdom. Good, solid, hard-working, commendable sorts, potatoes are the kind of vegetable you might marry, but would never have an affair with.
Potatoes don’t do themselves any favors. Other crops, come harvest time, have beauty with their bounty. The full heavy waves of wheat, the dry golden rustle of corn and the shimmering ponds of rice all hint at what they hold. But potatoes, oh potatoes, when it comes to digging time, a potato field is a woeful sight, all dirt brown and scraggly vines gone dead on the ground. Such a field looks abandoned. There is no sign anywhere of what is buried beneath.
Potato people, like their product, tend toward self-effacement. They do not, for example, tend to gush about the gastronomic qualities of taters. They do not tend to be gourmets.
Jack Simplot, the biggest potato person of them all, says he has a fondness for McDonald’s, but otherwise eats “whatever’s on my plate.”
Asked what kind of food a particular restaurant in Kennewick serves, Walter LePage, a potato farmer, says, “I think they specialize in dinner.”
Asked if there is any special way he likes potatoes, he says no.
“To tell you the truth, my wife doesn’t cook very well,” he says.
Waxing poetic about potatoes, then, probably would be fruitless. So let’s begin again.
This story is about war, sex and money. True, it is about war, sex and money among potatoes, but those three are nothing to be sneezed at, ever. Especially sex and money.
I’ll admit right off the sex part isn’t real exciting, but it’s crucial to the story. Here it is. Potatoes reproduce. If they didn’t, no one could grow them. No one could slice, dice, freeze or fry them.
Which brings us to money. The money part is much better than the sex part. Here are a couple of anecdotes about potato people and money.
“I was teaching school over there in Richland,” Walter LePage says. “I was making $3,100 a year. I came over here to grow potatoes (in 1952), the first year I made $12,000. I told those teachers, `Wait’ll I know what I’m doing.’ ”
Potato people are loyal. Walter LePage is a potato person.
Potatoes have been good to him and he to them. A Columbia Basin potato farmer, his devotion to the tuber is such that on the day Wendy’s restaurants announced they were going to start serving baked potatoes as meals in themselves, he went out and purchased 500 shares of Wendy’s stock. It was his way of saying thanks, of returning Wendy’s show of faith in the potato with his own show of faith in Wendy’s.
It should be added, however, that it was also good business for LePage. After the stock split, the price eventually climbed back to its original level and LePage sold his shares, doubling his money in the process. Even loyalty has its financial limits. Potatoes apparently do not. Fortunes, seemingly fathomless in some cases, have been made in the spud trade.
LePage has done well plowing and planting his small Franklin County acreage and there are hundreds of others just like him, but they’re all small potatoes compared to Jack Richard Simplot of Boise, Idaho.
Certain islanders of the West Indies have a phrase to describe someone of great wealth. “Esta en las papas,” they say, he’s in the potatoes. Jack Simplot is in the potatoes. Simplot, son of Iowa farmers, has worked over six decades to become the acknowledged spud king of the western world.
“I just left home as a kid and got me a room in a rooming house in Declo, board and room for a dollar a day and, by God, I hustled it from there,” Simplot, 76, says, sitting in his office in the second-highest building in Idaho, looking out over the hills surrounding Boise, many of which he owns.
“I traded pigs, chickens, sheep, junk, anything to make a buck. I got to sorting potatoes. I really got started when hogs got awful cheap about ’26, ’27, somewhere in there, and you could buy a hog for, well, I bought 500 head of hogs for $500. Sows, boars, little ones, big ones, took ’em all. I went back and my old daddy give me a place down on Marsh Creek. He had a 40 down on the creek and he let me build a hog pen down there and I gathered up about 700 head of hogs and I fed those hogs for nothing _ potatoes and horse meat.
“I’d go out on the desert and kill a couple of Cayuse horses and jerk the hides off ’em, get enough for the hides to buy my gas, and I fattened those hogs on potatoes and horses. . . .
“Got a hot hog market, sold ’em for 7 cents a pound. That was a lot of money back then. Then I bought a string of horses and farm machinery and went farming. I started to grow potatoes.
“That damned potato business, it grew and it grew and it grew.”
And keeps growing. Forbes magazine recently ranked Simplot as one of the richest men in America, estimating his privately owned company is worth $550 million. He’s not alone. The potato business worldwide is worth billions of dollars a year.
Which brings us to war.
Potatoes tend to make people smile. Gordon Randall is not smiling. He is not smiling because he is being forced to talk about something which to him is an unhappy subject. He is talking about Washington potatoes. Randall is executive director of the Idaho Potato Commission.
The general attitude of Idaho potato people toward Washington is evidenced by an offhanded comment in a book on the Idaho potato industry, a book called “Aristocrat in Burlap.” In a chapter devoted to Simplot, the nonpareil of Idaho potato people, the authors state:
“J.R. Simplot was not born in Idaho. He traveled to the Gem State in an immigrant car with his father, mother, brothers and sisters. The Simplots went first to Washington, where they soon became dissatisfied, and back-tracked to Idaho.”
No explanation for this dissatisfaction is given. It is as if none was needed, dissatisfaction with Washington being something that every right-thinking person _ or at least every person reading a book on Idaho potatoes _ could reasonably be expected to understand.
Sitting in his Boise office, surrounded by national Arbitron maps and advertising awards, Randall is talking about Washington potatoes generally and about a recent Washington State Potato Commission advertising campaign in particular. The campaign makes light of Idaho’s Famous Potatoes, as the tubers are called on all Idaho motor-vehicle license plates. The campaign points out that while Idaho made potatoes famous, Washington made them fly. The campaign features fanciful pictures of baked potatoes in midflight. The point of the advertising is to emphasize the fluffiness of Washington potatoes. The implication is that all other potatoes are, by comparison, mere rocks just waiting to sink in some unsuspecting diner’s belly.
That ticked him off for about a year, Randall says.
But then just about any mention of Washington potatoes tends to raise Mr. Randall’s hackles. For unbeknownst to the general public, Idaho and Washington are engaged in the second great potato war.
The first potato war was fought in 1778-79 between Prussia and Austria. it was so named because the dueling armies survived by eating one another’s potatoes. When the potatoes were all gone, they quit fighting and went home.
That isn’t likely to happen this time, if for no other reason than that the combined populations of Idaho and Washington could not conceivably eat up the potato production of either one of them if they wanted to. The two states last year produced 40 percent of the American potato crop, a staggering 14 billion pounds of spuds. At current national per capita consumption rates _ 121 pounds of potatoes per person per year _ the people of Washington and Idaho would need almost 30 years to eat up just one season’s harvest.
This second great potato war is a war, in any event, that is being fought not in the potato fields, but in the national psyche, where underdog Washington seeks to undermine the long-held pre-eminence of the Idaho potato, a lofty status due in some measure to Randall’s organization, the Idaho Potato Commission.
Thanks in large part to the commission’s efforts, the mere mention of the word Idaho conjures up images of whole mountain ranges of potatoes and Idaho long ago became the number one potato-producing state in the nation, supplanting Maine. It has so completely supplanted Maine that Randall can afford some compassion for down-easters. He invariably refers to the state as “poor Maine,” as in, “Poor Maine doesn’t have the water.”
Poor Maine has fallen all the way to fifth in total potato production, trailing Idaho, Washington, California and Oregon. Poor Maine is barely worthy of Randall’s attention.
Washington, however, is. Washington ranks second behind Idaho in total annual potato production and, more important, as far as Washington potato people are concerned, far out-produces Idaho and everyone else in average yield. Potatoes typically provide more edible food per acre than any major crop in the world, on average five times the output of rice, 12 times that of wheat and 14 times soybeans.
Washington growers double these numbers, producing more potatoes per acre than anyone else, anywhere.
Washington’s yields are nearly twice those of Idaho’s. While Washington plants only eight percent of the nation’s potato acreage, it produces 16 percent of the total crop.
Based upon these higher yields, the Washington Potato Commission once claimed Idaho potatoes grew better in Washington. Idaho _ or at least the Potato Commission _ was outraged and sued. The lawsuit raised a good question: What exactly is an Idaho potato?
The question was not simply answered. Washington and Idaho grow predominantly the same kind of potato _ a variety known as the Burbank Russet or the russet, as it is more familiarly called.
In the end, it was decided that Idaho potatoes were potatoes grown in Idaho _ how about that? _ and that Washington could not talk about growing Idaho potatoes in Washington, even if they were the same potatoes. It was also agreed, however, that Idaho should refrain from describing potatoes it imported from Oregon as Idaho potatoes. Both sides claimed victory.
Is is unquestioned that Idaho was the first state to grow russets in commercial quantities. It is also unquestioned that the quality of its crop and the early marketing successes Idaho enjoyed with the russet helped to foster the notion that Idaho alone grew that type of potato.
“Aristocrat in Burlap” says:
“Potato scientists have speculated it was not the russet Burbank that made Idaho famous, but rather Idaho that made the russet Burbank famous.”
Whichever came first, Idaho or the potato, it was clear from the time a Presbyterian minister named Henry Spalding brought the two together that he was a better matchmaker than missionary. Spalding planted the state’s first potatoes in 1836 in an attempt to convince the Nez Perce Indians of the value of the white man’s ways. The potatoes took; Presbyterianism, alas, did not and Spalding was eventually forced to flee in 1850 following the Whitman massacre.
The real breakthrough for Idaho potatoes came with the introduction of the aforementioned Burbank Russet, a chance discovery of the famed horticulturist Luther Burbank.
Burbank’s potato was a mutation that proved to produce larger, more solid, more disease-resistant potatoes than any of the several thousand potato variants that preceded it. The potato is a native of the Andes mountains where it was cultivated by the Incas, and although it grows everywhere from the equator to near the Arctic Circle, it grows best in alpine climates. It proved ideally suited to the warm summer days and cool summer nights of the Idaho growing season.
Before World War II, Idaho had the russet to itself, being one of the few areas with the right climate, inclination, growing season and access to large amounts of water the russet required. The potato as a finished product is about 80 percent water. This water _ a 160-acre potato field needs a stunning 28 million gallons of it a year, the equivalent of four feet of rain _ has to come from somewhere. In Idaho’s case, it comes from the Snake River, in whose valley most of the state’s potatoes are grown.
Central Washington has similar soil _ a sandy loam whose principal constituent is volcanic ash _ and an even better, that is longer, growing season, but prospective farmers did not have the water they needed.
“In order to raise your Burbank, you need water when the potato needs it,” says Dave Taylor, an officer of Washington’s largest potato processor. “You can’t depend on nature.”
Nature, in fact, has little to do with the modern potato. The water is imported. The soil isn’t really soil at all, not in the sense that it is loaded with nutrients. It’s a medium, an empty vessel into which the seed, water and fertilizer are poured. Eventually, scientifically, with almost boring predictability, out pops potatoes.
With construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, huge new agricultural areas were opened in the Columbia Basin of Washington and Oregon. Suddenly, a lot of water was available, enough to grow potatoes or anything else. For little reason other than this, Washington and Oregon were well on their way to becoming potato powers.
And when growers in the two states chose to grow the russet, they eventually destroyed what had been an Idaho near-monopoly.
“They’re all the same potatoes,” says Linda McCashion of the National Potato Promotion Board in Denver, Colo. Not even Randall, she says, could sit down to a table and distinguish an Idaho spud from a Washington one.
And to the big boys in the potato business, spuds are homeless, nameless soldiers in a bigger war. Potatoes might be 80 percent water, but they’re 100 percent money
“If you’re going to get rich, you got to get what you call depreciation,” says J.R. Simplot, speaking as one who knows. “They haven’t figured out a way to beat you out of it. You got to start growing. That’s what I did and still do, keep plowing it back in.
“Show me a good mine or a good venture and by God I can’t sleep. I’ve had the gold fever, the silicon fever, the magnesium fever, the potato fever. I’ve had ’em all.”
And done well by most of them. It was in the interests of depreciation _ growth _ that Simplot made his greatest discovery. In fact, in the way of these things, Simplot didn’t make the discovery at all.
“That came about because we at Simplot at the time (the end of World War II), were looking for new products,” says Ray Dunlap, then a chemist working for Simplot, helping to develop the dried and processed foods that Simplot was supplying to the U.S. armed services thereby compiling his first fortune and looking for his second.
In all the annals of potato time, there has never been another day quite like it. On this day, Ray Dunlap did more for the future of the potato than anyone since the Incas gave it to the Spaniards. Dunlap gave the French fry to McDonald’s.
It was a roundabout route, but Dunlap invented the modern French fry and ended up making a lot of money for a lot of people, none of them named Ray Dunlap. “We stumbled onto it really,” Dunlap says.
“We just put the right sets of circumstances together. We tried different ways of frying them, different ways of preparing them for the best interior quality.”
Dunlap discovered that if you fried a French fry briefly, then froze it before refrying, the thing took on a texture, a delicious mealiness quite unlike any other potato product.
Simplot recalls saying, “ `Hell, you can’t freeze a potato, they’ll just turn to mush.’ I knew how they did when we got a freeze in the field. But anyway I got him this icebox. One day he comes out and says, `Why don’t you try these French fries, they’ve been frozen.’ I said, `My God, you can’t do that.’ But he had some damned nice frozen potatoes.”
Damned nice, indeed. After some years of convincing, Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, abandoned in the interests of growth any further association with the fresh potatoes he had been using and began buying frozen French fries from Simplot for all his stores. Simplot, too, soon abandoned fresh potatoes completely, except to buy them and turn them into French fries, hash browns and a hundred other potato products.
The French fry became the foundation upon which he built what he calls “a pretty good rig.”
“See that right there, that’s just a little plant I built in Canada. Now that’s a big plant. It’s bigger than that now, that’s an old picture. And I got five of ’em. The one at Pocatello’s three times that big, a mile long, by God, big spreads. And I got three in California. It’s taken a lifetime to do it, but by God, I got ’em.”
Every day now, four to five million pounds of potatoes will pass through just one of Simplot’s several potato plants. A hydraulic symphony of automated hisses and clicks propels potatoes through the plant. In less than an hour, each spud is sorted, washed, steamed, peeled, blanched, dipped, frozen, fried and frozen again. Uniform size is checked with calipers. Uniform taste is tested daily.
Demand for these processed potatoes is so big supply has never matched it. It is this demand for processed potatoes that has driven the Northwest potato industry. Simplot and other processors make so many fries that Jack Simplot says, “You wonder where the hell they all go.”
The finished products are shipped off to the thousands of McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Wendy’s, Burger Chefs and Kings, Dairy Maids and Misses, Big and Little Bob’s and others of their family across the world. The money is shipped off to Simplot’s bank accounts. This has been an enormously profitable industry and this fact has not been lost on others. The success of the fast-food franchisers and suppliers has spawned all manner of imitators and would-be challengers, some of them nearly as successful as the pioneers.
Washington’s version of the Simplot Co. is an operation out of Othello in Adams County, owned by Peter Taggares, a son of Greek immigrants who, starting at age 19, built from the ground up the largest agricultural operation in the state.
“Nothing is small,” says Dave Taylor, Taggares’ chief finance officer. “The numbers get pretty amazing. The potato business worldwide is small. You can count on one hand the number of people who have any influence.”
On the first two fingers of that hand are Simplot and Taylor’s boss, Taggares. Taggares came into the Columbia Basin with the water after World War II, one of the first to recognize the potential of what could be done with cheap land and cheap water.
Joe Spiruta, an Oregon potato man, recalls looking at the type of basin land that Taggares would eventually turn to gold. “They were having a veteran’s lottery, so I drove through that country and I said, `They couldn’t give me the whole basin.’ That shows how smart I am,” Spiruta says.
The land, in truth, is pitiful without water. Raggedy scrub grass and random sagebrush are its only crops. Pete Taggares went into the business of imposing order on this mess. Order he has gotten.
On Taggares property, says Taylor: “Everything is white and there are no weeds.”
Nothing grows that isn’t supposed to on the 50,000 acres Taggares is farming on both sides of the Columbia. Even the tractors are painted white and the ditches are bare of weeds. Unlike Simplot, who no longer grows his own potatoes, Taggares handles every step in the production of his Chef-Reddy processed potatoes.
“We don’t hand it off to a third party until it leaves our dock,” Taylor says.
In the fall, the spud trucks rolling up and down Washington 17, connect the scattered ends of the Taggares operations. Spudnik mudflaps flying their motto, “Potatoes handled like babies.”
Taggares and Simplot have often not handled their competitors like babies. They are, competitors say, old put-up-or-shut-up, seat-of-the-pants businessmen, sharpies, as Simplot calls Taggares.
Simplot has shed himself of more than one partner over the years and he delights in telling the sometimes shameless stories, which might end with: “And that’s how I got rid of my partner in the onion business.”
He is the antithesis of the modern MBA businessman. He won his first mechanized piece of farm equipment by the flip of a coin and has bought more property than he can remember at tax sales. He’s been fined by the Internal Revenue Service and suspended from commodity exchanges.
He says, “I’ve built my business around people who would hustle. . . . You get out in this old free economy of ours, by God, you’ll find out they’re all rough and tough.”
Simplot and Taggares have joined forces occasionally, once with particularly ill effect on those who opposed them. The pair of them 10 years ago cornered the market on Maine potato futures being traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was a fight, Simplot says, between western processors like himself who wanted to keep potato prices down, and speculators who wanted to drive them up.
“I give these boys some lessons. . . . Broke ’em all. They all went bankrupt, then they all sued. I’m still battling law suits on the goddamned thing, but I had their money. . . . It’s guts and money, that’s all, guts and money.”
Potato people get upset when their product is in any way maligned.
The more learned of them say the Incas had the right attitude, one expressed in this prayer:
“Multiply also the fruits of the earth, the potatoes and other food that thou hast made.”
The prayer more or less puts the potato in its proper place, potato people say. The potato comes first. Everything else is an also-ran.
Still, bad-mouthing the potato has been a not infrequent occurrence over the centuries. At various times the poor potato has been accused of causing everything from flatulence to leprosy and lust and it was once banned in Burgundy for the former of these. But far and away the most common modern imprecation – and a more grievous contemporary sin is hard to imagine – is that potatoes are FATTENING.
Winifred Curtiss is living proof to the contrary. In 15 years of measuring, smelling and tasting potatoes eight hours a day in J.R. Simplot’s Caldwell, Idaho, plant, she has kept her figure because she minds her own potatoes.
“As long as you don’t start sampling other people’s lines, you stay out of trouble,” she says, and pops a skin-on Kentucky Fried Chicken fry into her mouth, carefully recording the experience on a quality-control data sheet
Offended potato people will slap their own bellies, flat as potato chips, to give lie to the fat charge. It’s not the potato, they say. It’s the way it’s prepared and it’s all those nasty things people put on it – butter and sour cream being the most frequently accused culprits.
What they don’t say, of course, is that no one would want to eat a potato naked. What they do say is that the potato is nutritious.
Potatoes are one of a group of foods known as complex carbohydrates, foods some nutritionists have lately taken to promoting.
You could, it is said, survive indefinitely eating nothing but five pounds of raw potatoes and drinking a little milk each day. One boiled, unpeeled potato has 120 calories, 3 grams of protein, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 16 milligrams of calcium, one milligram of iron, 22 milligrams of vitamin C and 1.6 milligrams of niacin.
And let’s face it, potato people say, if it weren’t for French fries, would anybody really want to eat hamburgers?