September 23, 2015

POTATO  PEOPLE

Potatoes are a hard dry brown crop - needing

to be dug up out of the dirt brown earth. They

are not pretty or attractive and delicious looking

like a plum or cool yellow green grapes or a rich

red apple. Potatoes are like the necessary people.

And look at the hands of the potato diggers.

They are not the pretty people - the types that

make People Magazine. Nope. But they are

the necessary people - the many of the earth.

Did you know potatoes are the fourth largest

crop on the planet - right after maize. wheat

and rice? Did you know that they too immigrated

from western South America and have been

on the move ever since - planted all over the earth?

And like the poor and the unpretty, potatoes are

placed on dinner plates off to the side - never

the main feature. Yet they are as necessary

as the waiter or waitress bringing us the meal  -

or those who dig the potatoes or those who

help transport them all around our world.

Lord teach me to see the potatoes I eat and

that I see the poor of the earth when I walk

this earth - this rich brown ground beneath me.

© Andy Costello, Reflections, 2015

Painting in middle, The Potato Harvest,
(1855) by Jean-Francois Millet

Painting at bottom, The Potato Eaters
(1855) Vincent van Gogh