My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes | Hacker News Reader

My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes

astralcodexten.com

66 pointsnvader53 comments

Wow, what an exquisite piece of writing.

The core idea of modernity's tendency to take a Good Thing and chop it up into tiny pieces and bind it into Something Resembling Good Thing[1] hit me hard. I've long felt a discomfort with things that pretend to be other things[2]; just be the thing that you are! There's something particularly macabre about the fake version of the thing being built from the ground up bones of the actual thing.

Also: the Incas invented a natural freeze drying method‽ Totally tracks that would lead to a big military advantage before there were many effective ways to preserve food. But also like, what? It took ~500 years for us to rediscover that.

1. examples from the article: McNuggets, American cheese, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles, particle board, sheetrock, video compilations, gig economy jobs

2. like fake window shutters on houses, brick siding that's meant to look like the house is made of brick, artificial food dyes, the fiberglass shell on the outside of cars, things painted look like they're a different color.

Oh wow, I felt like I was reading my own kid's writing for a moment, as this is very much our situation. They get tired of hearing my long-winded tangents of potatoes being the ultimate food, and of course, my particular affection for mashed potatoes. I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk, and I never bothered fact checking that despite me repeating it to them often - and asking guess what's made of potatoes and milk?

That aside, I'm guessing the author's aversion as a child is strictly texture based which is fair. Don't get me wrong, fresh prepared is better, but instant potatoes, especially the Idahoan brand, taste exactly the same to me. It's just that they're too perfectly thin and uniform, quite unnaturally so.

Some commenters allege that the author and his father prepared the instant mashed potatoes wrong; in particular, they dumped boiling water directly onto the flakes, which the directions on the package say not to do.

There is a digression early in Knut Hamsun's novel Growth of the Soil, where for a paragraph or two he goes on about how great potatoes are and also mentions the same thing about man needing just potatoes and milk.

It's an incredible novel, and I have read it periodically since I was a teen, with so many great musings on the meaning of life but I always remember the passage on potatoes. Couldn't for the life of me tell you why that's stuck in my head so much.

EDIT

What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve. Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside. Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato — a blessed thing!

Wonderful

Well I'm for one glad it did. Never heard of this book, but it sounds interesting enough (and not just because of the potato paragraphs) that I just ordered a copy.

Thanks!

You're in for a treat. Its one of my all time favs. Very contemplative about man, nature, the search for meeting and really the whole emotional spectrum of a lived life. Won the Nobel prize for literature in the 1920s and still holds up very well as a very readable book by modern standards.

I, too, love the potato. I like to boil them with broth, oil, lemon juice, and garlic and spices, then lightly roast to finish.

> I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk

Protein is not a monolith; it's nine different compounds that are needed, for humans. Meat has all of them. But most plant foods do not. A person will eventually starve from lysine deficiency if they eat nothing but wheat, rice, millet, most grains really. Even though these are rich in protein. That might be why bread and rice is so often paired with beans; beans are rich in lysine and the combination covers all the bases.

One of the proteins that the potato lacks relatively is methionine; a large active adult man needs perhaps 1 - 2 gram of methionine per day. Potatoes have about 500 mg methionine per kg. That works out to some 2 - 4 kg of potatoes a day and some 1500 - 3000 calories to go with it. (Plausible enough, if you ask me. When I was younger and worked a labour job burning lots of energy I would cook a 2 kg bag of potatoes and they'd be gone in a couple days.) It does seem nothing but boiled potatoes, salt and maybe a multi-vitamin and some fat, will keep a person going more or less indefinitely. I can't do the mostly-potato diet myself anymore though. I would get very fat.

If you ever wonder how fine-dining restaurants do their mashed potatoes, here’s a video from the chefs at Fallow: https://youtu.be/MvSYttvUxA0?si=9BbZtiS0bb87MGON

This reminds me of how I thought I didn't like the taste of butter growing up, because my family called margarine "butter" and never bought the real stuff.

Ironically, I saw a street food shop about a decade ago that used real butter as a condiment but called it margarine in the menu. He said he was doing that because customers preferred margarine over butter.

> National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes.

Vichyssoise is not French food. it's a dish made by a French chef who worked in New York. ask any French and they would have no idea what a Vichyssoise is.

Fine, gratin dauphinois, then.

> ask any French and they would have no idea what a Vichyssoise is.

Neither would most Americans!

It's nice to know both cultures are equally provincial in this regard. :)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Looks like this is the fourth submission, but the first to get any comments.

Yes, I read the article back then, it's just came to my interest what there are multiple submissions at the same time (and now again) on a very... obscure topic.

Oh man. Instant mashed potatoes are bad even at the best of times. I can only imagine how truly awful they would be if made with margarine and skim milk inside a microwave. My heart goes out to the author for having to eat something that nasty.

I like how decades after the “Sokal Affair”, slatestarcodex is creating its own impish simulacrum of English departments in the 90s. The author would do well to note Frederic Jameson’s own definition of simulacrum: a copy of which there was never an original. Case in point: restaurant mashed potatoes (which the author blithely considers “Real”) are nothing at all like home-made, which Michelin-starred chefs like Dave Chang will readily attest. They are riced, not mashed, then mixed with as much butter as humanly possible. Restaurant mashed potatoes represent their own decadent, post-industrial, post-modern..simulacrum.

Chef. n. A person who is not afraid to use more butter than you.

This reads to me bit like Baudrillard's general points (he took a semiotic view on this phenomenon). The author might (or might not, 20th century French philosophy can be intimidating) benefit from reading Simulacra and Simulation. There's even a well known introduction to his thought that uses a similar food concept [1].

1: http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillar...

We keep a couple packs of instant mashed potatoes on hand, but never to use by themselves. It's an acceptable way to quickly scale up real mashed potatoes if you've found that you need more than you planned for. As long as you don't overdo it, the result is adequate.

I keep canned peeled potatoes on hand they are very versatile and you end up with a better result

I use those all the time when I want fried potatoes.

Not a bad way to thicken a soup, either. I prefer it to using cornstarch (a roux still has the best flavor and consistency in my opinion, though).

One of my favorite kitchen hacks is to make batches of roux and then freeze it. I break off chunks when and as needed.

> It's an acceptable way to quickly scale up real mashed potatoes...

Goes with Hamburger Helper.

The secret to any great mashed potatoes, ungodly amounts of butter. Just enjoy them and don’t think about the calories but probably stay away from them for a year. Side note one of the first recipes I tried myself was from Chef John of the Food Wishes channel on Youtube.

I predict this was not Scott. Since he sometimes slips his own reviews into the competition.

The finalist authors' identities were revealed in October when the contest ended. This post is by Chris Finkle of https://tereglith.substack.com. Scott Alexander didn't write any of this year's entries.

> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten

I don't believe potatoes have any gluten.

Probably means starch.

I wonder if the author had some more profound message?

Is it about pulverizing software artifacts into token statistics?

What remains is not "code", but code-shaped matter?

I was about 20 years old when I ate real mashed potatoes for the first time. I've never eaten that instant crap since then.

This is all very confusing for me.

I first tried instant mashed potatoes about five years ago.

Before then, I never even knew there was such a thing!

I don't think I can tell them apart from fresh mashed potatoes.

The ones that I have tried are plain (no onion flavoring, etc), mixed with salted butter and coffee cream.

How are people who hate the instant variety preparing them? I am curious if I simply have bad taste, or if it's some other factor.

It's been decades since I last had it but everything was worse. Especially the texture. IIRC you heated water and/or milk and then you just poured the flakes inside and stirred.

It's so easy to make real mashed potatoes that I think there's really no point in using instant.

The penultimate backpacking/climbing meal IMO is chatas and mash, in which you mix instant mashed potatoes with chatas. I like the idea that it feels like an extension of chuño and the original development of instant mashed potatoes haha.

I like particularly Idahoan instant mashed potatoes, other instant mashed potatoes are inferior (and or horrid cardboard flavored mush). Perhaps there are preparation details, perhaps the ones in the plastic cups are awful as opposed to packets or Costco sized cartons, perhaps (this is much more likely) the excessive amount of butter and often good sharp cheese I include makes a difference.

Instant mashed potatoes are a common lazy meal or a "I forgot to eat now I find existence infuriating for some mysterious reason" meal. I find them quite satisfying. They are nutritionally complete enough, filling enough, and easy enough to fill a solid niche in my food repertoire. And an easy vehicle for four of the satisfaction food groups: salt, butter, cheese, and carbs.

If you're feeling very slightly more ambitious, sautee some chopped cabbage in a bit of butter until it softens, then mix it into the instant mash. True Irishmen may shudder but I do enjoy my trailer park colcannon, it's more of a real meal than just taters.

I'll defend them too. We've used them when in the US as a side dish when camping, or in hiking meals in backcountry. Handy enough that we bring a few packets back to Australia as a lazy option.

I feel so bad for picky eaters like his father.

> Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.

Ireland was exporting food throughout the famine, enough to have fed all of its people. The story there is one of economics and hands-off capitalism as much or more than it is about crop failure.

I don’t think capitalism is to blame in this particular instance.

As I recall, Britain arranged the Acts of Union so they could exploit Ireland as a cheap source of food, labor, and soldiers. The success of the Napoleonic Wars encouraged them to accelerate production by any means necessary. They may not have intended for Ireland to become a food monoculture, or anticipated its failure by 1840, but they certainly did little to remedy the situation their imperialism brought about.

Why did Ireland export food while the people were starving? Capitalism. The poor tenant farmers had to export food to… pay rent!

tl;dr

My Dad loves instant mashed potatoes. I think they taste awful. A long history of potato consumption. People like potatoes, particularly mashed potatoes. Thus there is money to be made out of selling them as a product, allowing people to skip the peeling, boiling, and mashing. People still buy the product even though it is objectively bad and not even proper mashed potato. This phenomenon seems ubiquitous. Maybe industrial capitalism itself is bad.

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This would be a fine nonfiction piece if they hadn’t grafted their thinly-veiled opinion about LLMs into the middle of it in such an off-putting, awkward way. I guess that was the reason why they wrote the folksy nonfiction bits in the first place, though.

It was an offhand 20 words out of a 5000 word article and a very pertinent example. I guess the question is, why were you not bothered by the negative opinion about instant coffee or particleboard or malls or Tinder or McNuggets, but hearing anything negative about LLMs is worth singling out to complain about?

The article boils down (pun intended) to, “you already accept all these things which I am glossing as basically instant mashed potatoes, so you should also accept LLMs.”

That’s why they not-so-subtly start calling them IMPs when they introduce the “abstracted version.”

It’s not merely an example. It’s the thesis of the article.

EDIT: Out of perversity, I skimmed the comments. The audience of Astral Codex Ten seems to share this interpretation, for whatever that’s worth.

I read the post as pretty clearly anti-LLM (and anti-instant-mashed-potatoes).

I found it funny (and annoying) that the article used an obvious LLM slopism immediately before that bit. It made me wonder how much of it was itself instant reconstituted wordslop.

> a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine.

Yuck; you're supposed to use milk, and butter.

> Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today:[with real potatoes, milk and butter]:

Exactly.

Did you read the whole article? You might like it.

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