Home of the fry

If eating is about searching for belonging through the stomach, then the world’s most-powerful nation is at home, sweet home with the fried potato.

A seven-week survey of eating on the north-east coast in New York, New Jersey and New England uncovered many wonderful and delicious things.

There was innovation and tradition in almost equal measure and the kind of wondrous variety that should spring from this highly multicultural nation. Good food appears from the smallest crevices, not always in the most likely locations. We found guacamole made at the table in Brooklyn, Latin Americans producing damn fine pizza and salt-crusted fish from wood ovens in the East Village, and perfect berry pie in Fairways grocery store cafeteria in Manhattan’s Upper WestSide.

Americans are minutely interested in what goes into their mouths: everything is dissected and discussed at length, and taken seriously. And that makes sense.

At the other end of the scale was the fried potato, in dozens of incarnations, sitting like a raft of indigestion over all – on virtually every plate, in every eating establishment, from the very top to the very bottom end. Forget 24-hour doughnut houses, hot-dog vendors on every corner, burgers at breakfast – the fry has the franchise on ubiquity.

No one asks ‘‘Do you want fries with that?’’ any more, they just come with, under and overflowing everything.

Fancy crisps, home-sliced, with spicy seasoning and sometimes dip, are offered in upscale restaurants as you mull your menu choices. ‘‘Home fries’’, a southern version of bubble and squeak, are offered with breakfast.

Club sandwiches have become the latest trend, moving from bars and room-service menus to high-end eateries. Overbalancing with layers of turkey, bacon, fish, mayonnaise, and pretty much every other kind of food, they always attract a hayloft of fries, just in case the jaw-bending ‘‘sandwich’’ is not enough.
Every item on every kids’ menu has fries with it, sometimes even the spaghetti bolognese and ‘‘mac cheese’’. Some particularly nasty establishments try to trick you into thinking the chip is the whole meal – offering a boat of fries smothered in revolting liquid orange cheese or chilli sauce, as a discreet item.
Main courses often come with salad or vegetables – but fries aremandatory. Order a bowl of soup in a cafeteria, and you will often get a bag of chips (crisps) to ‘‘go with it’’. Giant circular cross-hatched monstrosities, a bit like a fried potato waffle, seem to exist simply to save the eater the effort of lifting individual chips to the mouth. Chips come with sauce, with mayo, with gravy, with sour cream, with hummus.

Over the border, in the otherwise sane and measured nation of Canada, the American disease has invaded and become a national dish. Originating in rural Quebec, ‘‘poutine’’, in its most common form, is french fries drenched in a light gravy and topped with fresh cheese curds. Some restaurants (yes real ones, not ‘‘family’’ restaurants) offer poutine topped with caviar, lobster or truffles. What is going on? How can the home of the free be so in thrall of the fry?

If the United States used half the ingenuity that goes into getting us to eat more fried potatoes to combat, say, climate change, we’d all be driving pedal cars and recycling our underwear.

Don’t get the idea I am anti-chip; a good fried potato is a magnificent thing, and the perfect accompaniment to a juicy steak, or a piece of perfectly fried fish. But you simply cannot eat so much of the same thing – especially when it is a nasty, mass-produced shadow of its best – and continue to enjoy it. Sadly abused and overused fries are giving the spud, and the humble bagged crisp, a bad name, and it is time to say enough is enough.

Americans are said to consume 13 kilograms of french fries each, sprinkled with 1.2 kilograms of salt, washed down with 200 litres of soft drink, each year. That’s every American, babies and health nuts included.

Soon after the Paris Faculty of Medicine declared the potato fit for human consumption (it had been fed only to hogs previously), Benjamin Franklin along with Marie Antoinette attended dinners at which potato, done 20 different ways, was the only menu item.

It is a vegetable with almost infinite potential and variety, and real nutrient value. The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, is little known for his other key achievement, the introduction of the french fry to the US. He had them served at a White House dinner in 1802 describing them as ‘‘potatoes served in the French manner ... deep-fried while raw, in small cuttings’’. Little did he know they would become so ubiquitous and so abused.

As we leave the culinary wonderland of East Coast USA, I wonder whether I will ever consume another fried potato. But I comfort myself with two thoughts: even the cruellest airline chef will not feature fries in flight (they have other evil deeds to do); but also the stomach is fickle – and the spud will triumph. By the time we get home fish and chips on the beach will again prompt the right kind of tummy rumble.

>> Catriona Jackson is chief executive of lobby group Science and Technology Australia and a food writer.