Free Potatoes

This morning Nine and I were enjoying our breakfast at Starbucks before school when we met a plant geneticist.

I love meeting interesting people, so we started talking. He was passionate about potatoes and explained that he does for potatoes what other geneticists do for apples in creating the lovely varieties that we all enjoy like Honeycrisp.

I asked him what the potato equivalent to the Honeycrisp was, and he ran out to his truck and brought in a bag of P1995_R18 (or some such reference number) potatoes which he subsequently cut open to show me the beautiful red outside and combined yellow inside which he reported was high in vitamins C and A as well as potassium.

Then he gave me the whole bag!

I then had to inform him that I would be talking about potatoes in my ECO308 class this week as the classic example of the so-called Giffen Good!

If you'd like a free potato or two, stop by the econ office.

If they are a true Giffen good, I suspect people will demand fewer of them as the price falls to zero.