Potato Skins Jesus

Fucking Hell Nutritionists

I love baked potatoes, but I always feel guilty having the oven on for an hour and a half to cook two potatoes.

So in Winter I like to do them in my fire. You wrap them in foil and put them on the coal, and remember to turn them every half-an-hour or so, and sooner or later you've got campfire baked potatoes, which are awesome.

But unless you're really lucky you end up carbonizing the skins, so you end up eating buttered baked potato out of a sort of hard carbon pot made out of potato skin. Really nice, and brings back memories of childhood bonfire nights and camping and so on and so forth.

But it’s quite messy, and baked potato skins are nice to eat, and you only have to google to find hundreds of nutritionists telling you that all the vitamins and stuff are in the skins, and that you should totally eat the skins, that's where all the goodness is.

So imagine my joy when I realised that you can just put a big steel pot with a lid on top of the stove, and put a load of potatoes in it, and that they will then slowly turn into perfect baked potatoes over several hours. If, when hungry, you take out the ones that are done, turn over the ones that are not done yet, and add more potatoes to fill the pot up, you end up with a continuous effortless supply of excellent baked potatoes with edible skins.

I couldn't stop eating them, they were delicious. Especially with butter and cheddar cheese melted in.

In the days after this discovery I rather went to town on the idea, and when I'd finished one 2kg bag of potatoes I went and bought another one.

And on the third day, having eaten through the second bag as well, I had a rotten stomach ache and felt sick and had a headache, which wasn't quite bad enough to stop me sleeping, but was definitely not good and most uncomfortable, and I wondered how I'd managed to give myself food poisoning with only cooked potatoes and butter and cheese.

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Googling for 'potato poisoning' immediately brings up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine

Solanine is a pesticide that potatoes make to keep worms and such from eating them while they are underground.

It is mainly found in the skins, for obvious reasons, and stressed potatoes produce much more of it than normal. Which is why every schoolboy knows not to eat potatoes which have gone green.

Some quotes from that article:

> The majority (30–80%) of the solanine in potatoes is found in the outer layer of the potato.

> There is variation in glycoalkaloid levels in different types of potatoes, but potato farmers aim to keep solanine levels below 0.2 mg/g

> Ingestion of solanine in moderate amounts can cause death. One study suggests that doses of 2 to 5 mg/kg of body weight can cause toxic symptoms, and doses of 3 to 6 mg/kg of body weight can be fatal.

> Solanine poisoning is primarily displayed by gastrointestinal and neurological disorders. Symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, burning of the throat, cardiac dysrhythmia, nightmares, headache, dizziness, itching, eczema, thyroid problems, and inflammation and pain in the joints. In more severe cases, hallucinations, loss of sensation, paralysis, fever, jaundice, dilated pupils, hypothermia, and death have been reported.

> Most home processing methods like boiling, cooking, and frying potatoes have been shown to have minimal effects on solanine levels.

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So, assuming the relevant potato farmers succeeded in their aims, 4kg of baked potatoes should contain less than 0.8 grams of solanine.

And I am 95kg, so that's conceivably a dose of 8.4mg/kg over about three days.

Which is above the fatal dose.

The symptoms check out. I guess I was lucky.

And they weren't badly stored potatoes, they hadn't gone green, they were fresh from the supermarket in perfect nick.

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Fucking Hell Nutritionists

You are literally telling people to eat the poisonous bit of a poisonous plant.

And this is not some amazing new discovery. This is known, as the Dothraki girls so wisely say.

I guess we need look no further to work out why, traditionally, potatoes are usually peeled before cooking.