Read an Excerpt
Crunch!
A History of the Great American Potato Chip
By DIRK BURHANS University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright © 2008 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-299-22770-8
Chapter One
The Great American Vegetable The houses were all stocked with maize, beans and truffles, spherical roots which are sown and produce a stem with its branches and leaves, and some flowers, although few, of a soft purple colour; and to the roots of this same plant, which is about three palms high, they are attached under the earth, and the size of an egg more or less, some round and some elongated; they are white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavour, a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for the Spaniards. Juan de Castellanos, 1601
A man surveys an undulating green field that stretches almost as far as the eye can see-a carpet of eighteen-inch-high plants. A little farther away, the pattern is broken by a different variety of plant, this one dotted with millions of tiny snow-white flowers. The man has fluffy white hair and eyes that are the color of baby-blue marbles. Over six feet tall, he is solidly built. He has the body of a working man-a truck driver, a mechanic, a farmer.
A potatofarmer. Like his father and grandfather, Don Ramseyer has grown chipping potatoes his entire life. For three generations, the Ramseyer potato farm, an oasis of green on a rolling plain wedged between the suburbanizing towns of Wooster and Smithville, Ohio, has produced potatoes for potato chip factories. Now it is one of the last chipping potato farms left in Ohio.
Chipping potatoes are different from potatoes used for baking and salads. Because potatoes are mostly water, the act of frying them in hot oil leaves little potato matter when the water evaporates. In the early days, potato chip makers (called "chippers" in the business) tried the same varieties that we use for cooking at home-Russets, Katahdins, Irish Cobblers. But many of these yielded poorly, sometimes as little as 22 percent-twenty-two pounds of chips from one hundred pounds of raw potatoes. Today, chippers use modern varieties that can yield 30 percent or higher. These varieties have what chippers call high specific gravity-high dry-matter content.
Ramseyer grows two of the these varieties. One variety, Snowden-the one with white flowers in his field-is grown specifically for winter storage. Storage is important for the chip industry because fresh potatoes simply cannot be found from November to March. Chip factories-especially large ones like those of Frito-Lay, Wise, Herr's, and Utz-demand a product that is consistent the year round, a chip that tastes and looks the same all the time. Ramseyer makes his living from potatoes that chippers can use during the winter months.
"A problem we have with the Snowdens," says Ramseyer, "is stem end discoloration. The ideal thing is for them to die naturally, and then the chip quality is just excellent. If they're still green and growing and you're running out of time; you have to chemically kill them. But sometimes near the stem end there's a deposit of sugar that hasn't naturally tapped out, and it stays there-and when you chip 'em, there's a brown spot from the sugar."
Stem end discoloration is only one of many vagaries that potato growers and chippers have to deal with. Heat, internal necrosis, greening, sunscald, vascular browning, pressure bruises from storage, scabs, late blight, tuber rot, ring rot, mechanical injury, hollow heart, freezing ... the list goes on and on.
A major consideration in the quality of storage potatoes like Snowdens is heat. By winter, Ramseyer's winter storage barn will be loaded almost to the ceiling with four-foot-square wooden crates full of Snowdens. If the temperature is too low, the starch in the potatoes turns to sugar, yielding a brown chip. But if the temperature is too high, depending on the maturity of potatoes when harvested, sugars can also accumulate, resulting in a brown chip. Either temperature extreme results in what consumers like you and me usually call a "burnt" potato chip.
"Ideally, you keep it at fifty degrees," Ramseyer says. "One way to disperse that brown buildup on the Snowdens is to increase the heat in the storage barn." But when that happens, the potatoes will start to sprout, and Ramseyer will be forced to use a sprout inhibitor.
"Once we cranked it to sixty-five, and it took three or four weeks before the chip quality came around. But then you're under the gun to get the things outta here-when it's that warm they're gonna try to sprout no matter what, even with the sprout inhibitor."
Ramseyer goes to no small effort to make sure his potatoes are ripe for chipping, as he should; if a shipment arrives with more than 15 percent defects, it can be returned by the chipper, at Ramseyer's expense.
"If it's rejected"-here Ramseyer pauses, not quite sighing-"it comes back to me, and I pay for the freight down and back."
In 2003 Ramseyer dumped twenty-five semi-loads of potatoes because of sprouting. At least, if he dumps the potatoes, all he has to pay is the dumping charge. For potatoes that go far, say, to North Carolina, it's actually easier for Ramseyer to find a farm there that will take them for cattle feed, so that he doesn't have to pay the freight back. Ideally, Ramseyer says, perfect weather would be rain once every two weeks, with dry weather three to four weeks before harvest. If the potatoes are drier toward the end, the chips will be better.
"But if it's too dry," he says, "you get a poor yield. So dry conditions get that starch content up. But we never get that all just right. Never."
Irrigation could solve some of Ramseyer's problems but is economically unfeasible, even though it has led to the awkward situation in which he finds himself today.
"There's a Frito-Lay plant right here in Wooster," says Ramseyer. "For us it was maybe a four- or five-mile trip."
The Frito-Lay plant had been the Ramseyers' main buyer since 1946, when it was owned by a chipper called New Era. After Frito-Lay acquired New Era, it eventually bought 75 percent of the Ramseyer potatoes. On a given day, the chipping potatoes of Ramseyer and other local growers were as good as any, but without irrigation the Ohio farmers found it hard to meet the consistency level increasingly demanded by Frito-Lay. Frito dropped the Ohio potato farmers in 1990, changing to growers in Michigan and North Dakota who relied on irrigation for a uniform product. Ramseyer says those growers now ship their potatoes all the way from Michigan and North Dakota to Frito-Lay's Wooster plant, which is an hour's walk from the Ramseyer farm. (Frito-Lay spokesman Jared Dougherty says that Frito-Lay obtains chipping potatoes from "all over the country," not just Michigan and North Dakota, including trademarked chipping potato varieties grown especially for Frito-Lay.)
"We understood why that happened," says Ramseyer, "it was understandable. They wanted to go for a consistent crop every year. But we're so close."
After 1990, the Ramseyer farm-and the rest of the Ohio potato farms that had arisen to serve the Frito-Lay plant-had to look elsewhere for contracts. Where Ramseyer once served the nearby plant almost exclusively, it now supplies faraway chip companies like Wise in Pennsylvania through potato brokers.
On the day of my visit, Ramseyer is building a water storage pit for a potato washing operation. At this point, it is just a wedge-shaped hole cut into the ground, about five feet deep by ten feet wide, tapering to perhaps thirty feet in length. In the past, chippers washed the potatoes themselves; but recently some have placed the burden of washing back on the growers. Small chip plants don't like washed potatoes because it may take them as long as a week to go through a load, and wet potatoes are easily bruised. But for large plants that go through a lot of potatoes quickly, washing by the grower reduces the plant's labor and processing time. Potato washing is something new for Ramseyer and other growers. There are no places to buy the equipment, no designs for such a contraption, no blueprints-it is something that Ramseyer and other potato growers will have to come up with on their own.
Fresh Springtime Potatoes: Florida
While Ramseyer is harvesting and washing potatoes in October and November, growers in Florida are negotiating contracts for next year. In January, while Ramseyer's ground is frozen and he ships Snowdens from his heated barn, Florida growers will be planting fresh seed potatoes.
Each April there's a moment of mild anxiety in the chip industry: just as the winter storage potatoes from people like Ramseyer are running out, fresh Atlantic potatoes from Florida are coming on. If the two events don't dovetail-if there's a shortage in Florida due to a weather event or bad growing season, or if the winter storage potatoes don't last-big money players can tie up uncontracted, open-market Florida potatoes. Sarah Cohen, president of Route 11 Potato Chips in Middletown, Virginia, recalled a year when such an event occurred.
"There was a year when Rob from E. K. Bare [Pennsylvania potato broker] said, 'Sarah, I don't know what to tell you, but I can't [guarantee potato shipments].' It was right at cusp where they were running out of stored potatoes, waiting for April potatoes. They told us that plants were closing down. There's that two-week-to-a-month window when Florida's here; it's a small supply, but they were the only fresh potatoes anywhere."
A former chipping potato farmer from Florida, who wished to remain anonymous for this book, remembered the previous decade or so as a good period for Florida potato farmers-she and her husband were able to partially retire from the money they made during those times. Yet she also noted the leverage big chip plants had in the situation.
"In the late '80s and early '90s they [large buyers] would tie up as much of the market potatoes as they could. They had no feeling at all for the smaller chip plants. They could afford to pay, and didn't hesitate to do so. In '87 we got seventeen to eighteen dollars per hundredweight [one hundred pounds]. In '93, we got twenty-five dollars per hundredweight."
Florida has one of the highest costs per-acre for potato farming-the soil is sandy and requires chemicals; the weather is warm, so there are bug problems. Like their Ohio counterparts, Florida farmers have recently had to assume the expense of potato washing. And Florida's heat, even in early spring, can be a disaster for chipping potatoes, especially if they're wet.
"In Florida, heat will decimate potatoes," said the anonymous Florida farmer. "Atlantics have almost no skin. You can rub the skin off with your fingers. If they're wet-if the truck is delayed-you have a real problem."
"I carried a load of wet potatoes once, and you didn't get a hundred miles from the farm that you could smell that load of potatoes cooking. The juice runs out the bottom of the trailer," recalled Ira Rider, a retired potato buyer from Wooster, Ohio-almost next door to the Ramseyer farm. His daughter-in-law, Betty, has seen wet potatoes melt down in storage boxes "almost like ice cream."
Growers suggest too that the standards for white, unblemished potatoes increasingly demanded by Frito-Lay and other large chip plants are a sometimes arbitrary and fickle standard.
"A good friend once said to me that a blind man wouldn't know if he's eating a green potato chip; it tastes the same," said the anonymous Florida grower. "Once they found out that the average person doesn't care, they decided it doesn't matter. But they use blemishes as an excuse to drive down market prices paid to growers, even though the market research says it doesn't matter. It became a standard that the big buyers wanted to put in the grower's minds-that you have failed somehow."
"If you bruise them up, they won't take 'em," echoed Ed Rider, a potato buyer from Wooster, Ohio, and son of Ira. "The restrictions on the potato grower nowadays are ten times what it used to be. [It's because of] competition to have a white chip with no marks."
As with Ohio, increasingly stringent demands from large potato buyers, unpredictable weather events, and increasing costs of fuel, insurance, and chemicals have combined to make costs prohibitive for all but the largest Florida farmers. In an average year today, Florida growers may be getting two to three dollars per hundredweight compared to hundredweights in the teens in the 1980s and early 1990s. The anonymous Florida grower estimated that fifteen years ago there were some three hundred potato farms in her region of northern Florida compared to forty or fifty today, and that most of these are now in larger farms. Her family opted out of the business several years ago and now they grow cantaloupes and watermelons where they once grew potatoes.
"We always absorbed the added costs, but it got to a point where we couldn't," she said. "In the '80s it was good; in the early '90s it was good, but it got to a point where the contract price was not going up enough. After forty years in this we could no longer make a living."
As more and more Florida potato farms are lost to development, recent events in potato breeding may reduce chippers' dependence on early Florida potatoes. At the time of this writing, new varieties, such as Dakota Pearl and Glacier Chips, have been successfully stored into June, well past the April date when storage potatoes are usually giving out. According to some, these varieties will be able to tolerate storage temperature fluctuations as great as ten to twenty degrees without turning to sugar, chipping white the whole time.
New potato varieties like those could provide a big boost to Ohio potato farmers like Ramseyer, who need all the help they can get. With increased burdens such as irrigation and washing, Ramseyer estimates that where there used to be thirty to forty thousand acres of potato farms in Ohio, there now may be five to six thousand acres, with only half of that in chipping potatoes. Ramseyer's neighbors have added corn mazes, pumpkins, and hayrides to diversify sources of income as the market for chipping potatoes wanes. Other neighbors have said that if they have to start washing potatoes on top of everything else, they're finished.
Don Ramseyer doesn't share that viewpoint.
"You have to keep up with the times," he says. "That's what this is all about here," he adds, pointing to the hole in the ground that is to become a potato washer. "If you don't upgrade, and keep up with what they want, well ..."
At the moment, Ramseyer sells most of his potatoes to Wise, which has chip plants in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Selling to Wise seems to work out for both the Ramseyers and for Wise. It gives Ramseyer an advantage compared with the faraway Michigan farmers-no small advantage, considering the price of gas today.
"That's about the only advantage we have anymore. We don't irrigate; we have to depend on the weather, and the weather pretty much dictates the quality of your potato."
Irrigation versus drought; washing versus bruising; natural vine death versus chemical death; chemical death versus stem end discoloration; stem end discoloration versus cold storage; cold storage versus heated storage; sprout inhibitors versus sprouts.
Good chipping potatoes, versus paying the dumping charge in North Carolina, and dumping the whole load for cattle feed.
It's a long row to hoe for an Ohio chipping potato farmer.
Origins
If Florida is almost too hot for potatoes, it's because the vegetable is no stranger to cool places like the Ramseyer barn. Its entire history as a food product-from South American prehistory to the present-is intimately intertwined with temperature.
Within the nightshade family there are almost one thousand members of the potato's genus, Solanum, worldwide. The tuberous Solanums-the species having the fleshy underground stems, or tubers, that we eat-all originated in the Americas. While most tuberous Solanum species are South American, many are Central American or Mexican, and some are found as far north as Colorado, Utah, and even Nebraska. Although we are tempted to think of these locations as hot, within these regions potatoes are adapted to grow at cool altitudes-an adaptation key to the cultivated potato's later success in temperate climates like Maine and Ireland, as well as their persistence during the cool months in the Ramseyer barn. While elsewhere on the American continent, the great civilizations of the Maya, Aztecs, and Pueblo were built on maize, the high altitudes of the Andes were too cold. At altitudes over eleven thousand feet, maize grew stunted, and at over twelve thousand feet, it grew not at all. Manioc, a staple in the South American forest regions, did not grow in the highlands either.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crunch! by DIRK BURHANS Copyright © 2008 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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