Of the many kinds of vegetables grown all over the world, which remains the favorite of both the young and old? The potato, of course. Perhaps you know them as “taters”, “spuds”, or “Idahoes”. But it’s no matter, a potato by any other name is still a potato—the world's most widely grown vegetable. As a matter of fact, if you are a normal potato eater, you will eat at least a hundred pounds of them each year.
That's only a tiny part of the total grown every year, however. Worldwide, the potato harvest (收获) every year is over six billion bags, with each bag having a hundred pounds of spuds, some of them as large as four pounds each. In the United States, farmers fill about four hundred million bags a year. That may seem like a lot of taters, but it leaves us in third place among world potato growers. Farmers in Poland (波兰) dig up just over 800 million bags a year, while the Russians lead the world with nearly 1.5 billion bags.
People eat potatoes in many ways — baked (烘烤), mashed (捣成糊状), and roasted, to name just three. However, in the United States most potatoes are eaten in the form of French fries. One fast-food chain alone sells more than $1 billion worth of fries each year. No wonder, then, that the company pays close attention to the way its fries are prepared.
