The Sacred Potato and the £47 Checkout Page

Six potatoes. Forty-seven pounds. Ceremonial water sold separately. A brief investigation into what happens when wellness marketing gets hold of a vegetable. There is a potato. This should not be complicated. It grows in the ground. You dig it up. You wash it. You cook it. If you are Welsh, Irish, Peruvian, Northern European, or merely hungry, you already understand the basic arrangement. Humanity and the potato have had a long and productive relationship. It has got us through wars, winters, famines, school dinners, late-night hunger, and the emotional wreckage of realising there is nothing in the house except a bag of spuds and half a block of cheese. The potato has done enough. It does not need a rebrand. Unfortunately, the wellness industry has never met a perfectly ordinary food it could not spiritually overinflate, wrap in linen, photograph at dawn, and sell at a 4,000 percent markup. Which brings us to the Sacred Purple Andean Tuber. It is purple. It is ancestral. It is…