Yes ladies and gentlemen, it has arrived: The first annual Foobooz Potato Week. As we mentioned a couple weeks back, we here at Foobooz HQ have been hard at work planning all manner of things potato-ish for this week’s festivities–from lists and polls and essays to potato-based contests and a big guide to all the best french fries that this fine city has to offer, to be released on that most holy day of the Potato Calendar: Friday, July 13th, National French Fry Day.

So why Potato Week, you ask? Because potatoes are awesome. Because potatoes are a bedrock element of the classic American table–one half of the whole meat-and-potatoes duality that we lived and dined under for ages until our blessed bubble of gastronomic simplicity (or ignorance) was pierced by the coming of California cuisine, Asian fusion, sushi bars, lemongrass, raspberry coulis, wasabi, truffle oil, molten chocolate cakes and all manner of haute Froggery. Potatoes are the mother starch of American cuisine, the soft bed upon which most of our comfort foods lie. They are, at once, the simplest, most basic thing in the world and one of the most enduring ingredients in any canon wise enough to employ them. We here at Foobooz HQ love potatoes. We crave potatoes. We have fought about potatoes, plotted and planned over potatoes, spent long afternoons hunting after potatoes. Like corn or empanadas or whiskey, potatoes are so much a part of us that, molecularly speaking, I’m pretty sure that we’ve each got an arm or a leg that we owe entirely to the humble spud.

Thus, Potato Week in all it’s starchy glory. Feast, all, and be welcome. And stay tuned for our first Potato Week puzzler: The Sweet Potato, Friend Or Foe…?