It was the end of the 10-year reign of the eight-pound Manx Potato as the world's heaviest. The record has apparently been uprooted by a 25-pound spud from Lebanon, or has it?
"I didn't use any chemicals at all," Mr. Semhat said, "I've been working the land since I was a boy, and it's the first time I've seen anything like it."
The Manx's owner, Nigel Kermode of the Isle of Man, reluctantly conceded the crown: "We're still a world champion – we'll call it the second biggest potato in the world." His decade-old tater was reportedly "grey and brown" and hadn't been on display for quite a while.
But this is where it gets ugly, experts contacted by Scientific American say that Kermode has nothing to concede. Let's turn to Michigan State University potato expert David Douches for further explanation. He says the vegetable in Semhat's hands looks an awful lot like a sweet potato.
All of us in the Voodoo Kitchen took a closer look and we were just grateful it didn't look like the Virgin Mary.
To settle the matter, Kenneth Pecota, a plant breeder who has spent 15 years working on roots as part of North Carolina State University's (NCSU) Potato and Sweetpotato Breeding and Genetics Program was contacted.
So Mr. Pecota, what type of vegetable did Semhat dig out of his garden?
"It sure looks like a sweet potato to me. Everything about it, the skin color, the skin peeling off with the white underneath -- that's very common in big, sweet potatoes. When the sweet potatoes get big like that, that cracking is extremely common. You also have the veins, which are little fibrous roots growing under the surface, that's very common with sweet potatoes as well. We see stuff like that all the time at NCSU."
I don’t think he has a potato, I think he has a sweet potato. I'm guessing that there was confusion somewhere in the translation. It's probably a language thing.
Well then, according to Mr. smarty pants, perhaps it's a record-breaking sweet potato?
Go ahead, mash a man's dreams.
