The proposed changes to the dietary guidelines have ruffled feathers across the ag industry. However, one change surprised potato growers.
According to Kam Quarles, National Potato Council CEO, “They started the process with the notion that they could either entirely reclassify potatoes out of the vegetable category or make them interchangeable with grains. Fortunately, as you said, they discarded that notion, but they also landed in another bizarre place which is, for a country that does not eat enough vegetables, one of their recommendations, and granted these are just draft recommendations, but one of their recommendations is to eat fewer vegetables.”
Quarles argues that the proposal ignores all that potatoes have to offer nutritionally, taking into account opinion rather than science.
“They’ve concentrated their ideas around the starch that exists in potatoes. They’ve discarded all of the other nutritional benefits and just focused on this one, this one factor,” he explains. “Once you start injecting your personal values and opinions and, you know, kind of your cultural norms of what you see and believing that your food comes from a grocery store instead of coming from a farm, all of this, to my mind, kind of flies off the axel.”
Next steps in the dietary guideline development process include a period for public comment, that comment period will end on February 9th.
New estimates from the USDA predict U.S. potato production will total just 417,000 pounds this year. That would be a yearly decline of more than 5%.
Leading producing states like Idaho and Washington are contributing to that decrease, with adverse weather impacting yields.
However, export values reached a record $2.3 billion this year. A bright spot in an otherwise disappointing year.
