Record harvest causes “Flood of Potatoes”: Berlin celebrates with free mega deliveries

From Germany comes the story of mountains of potatoes that stretch as far as the eye can see, feeding everyone in Berlin and nearby towns.

For German potato farmers, the early winter harvest has been exceptionally abundant, so much so that it has overwhelmed food banks.

The “potato flood,” as it has been called, has reached Berlin, benefiting food banks, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, schools, kindergartens, churches and even zoos that receive a free portion of this bonanza. Two full trucks were sent to Ukraine.

“At first I thought it was fake news generated by artificial intelligence when I saw it on social media,” Astrid Marz, a teacher from Kaulsdorf, on the outskirts of Berlin, told The Guardian newspaper. “There were images of huge mountains of blocks of dirt.”

You have to be cautious nowadays, but the mountain of dirt apples was real: so real that Marz stopped counting after stuffing the 150th potato into an old backpack. She had arrived at a distribution point, where a non-profit organization called 4000 Tonnen was handing them out to anyone who arrived.

Organized by a Berlin newspaper with the help of a German ecological search engine, Ecosia, the name 4,000 tons comes from a Leipzig potato farmer who had a surplus of 4,000 tons after a sale in December fell through.

4000 Tonnen has visited 174 distribution points in Berlin and its suburbs, welcoming people with bags, boxes and even wheelbarrows to take away the potatoes. Berlin has been gripped by freezing weather lately, the kind of weather that invites potato and leek soup, potatoes with gratinor other preparations that are shared at distribution points, reports The Guardian.

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Kate Connolly, reporting from Berlin for the outlet, points out that Germans consume more potatoes per capita than almost any other country, at more than 120 pounds per person per year. During the days of the Prussian Empire, the “potato edict” ordered farmers to grow the South American crop as a new staple, and since then, potato has been the preeminent vegetable in the country.

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Michelin star chef Marco Müller of restaurant Rutz in Berlin has already taken advantage of the event to put potatoes into action at his restaurant, using them to make a delicious potato broth made from slow-roasted skins.

If not consumed, they are likely to be sent to landfill to decompose into methane gas, which although lasts a fraction of the time in the atmosphere compared to CO2, has a much stronger contribution to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.