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 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.

> 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.

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.

didnt realize slate star codex or whatever it was called had rebranded but still encouraging tedious long-winded pseudo-intellectual drivel.

I'm sure this guy thinks he's a genius, but that's a lot of blather for a rehashed point. almost like the mashed potatoes he hated as a kid!

at least it's dressed up as "the world is a lie", which I think is always the point of this community.

I hope he wins the scholarship to this grifters youtube channel or whatever the prize is. maybe it's just a pill that's colored red!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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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> The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten

I don't believe potatoes have any gluten.

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

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.