Mystery Math on Good Morning America: Who’s Waging War on Potatoes, and Why?

By Nicholas Stix

At 8 a.m. yesterday morning on GMA, the show presented the sort of phony “report” that George S. Schuyler would have called “moron fodder,” were he still alive.

An alleged “reporter” named John Berman comes on, saying that potato consumption is down 20 percent since 1996, but that the spud is in even worse trouble. The camera then switches to an “expert,” a white female of 40 or so, giving what may have been, or at least viewers were given to believe, was some sort of testimony that kids are eating too many potatoes. The “experts” are calling for schools to limit kids to two servings per week of potatoes.

The Boss sees this and says (imagine a Trinidadian accent), “They going to keep dem from eating d’ting they like,” and “They should eat less macaroni and cheese.”

You have to serve a starch with each meal, or the kids are going to get up from the table hungry. So what are the “experts” advising? There was talk suggesting that one must choose between lettuce and potatoes, with Maine Sen. Susan Collins defending Mr. Potatohead against Ms. Lettuce—while holding one in each hand—saying that potatoes have more Vitamin C than lettuce, but lettuce isn’t going to fill bellies, anyway, plus it’s too expensive. (Maine is a potato state, hence Sen. Collins’ entreaties, but its spuds aren’t very good.)

But Berman, the alleged reporter, never deals with his opening contradiction. Unless America’s population has decreased 20 percent since 1996, the average resident (since the Census Bureau refuses to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, there is no statistical “average American” we can work with here) is eating fewer potatoes than he did 15 years ago. Indeed, according to the folks at Negative Population Growth, on July 1, 1996, the U.S. had 265,189,794 residents, but now has 311,473,693 residents, an increase of 17.4 percent. So, in order to eat as many potatoes as we did in 1996, we would need to eat 17.4 percent more spuds. But instead, according to Berman, we are eating 20 percent fewer potatoes.

So, if Berman’s numbers are right, per capita potato consumption is down 31.9 percent. We need to eat more potatoes, not less!

What is really going on here? Since we’re dealing with moron fodder, it can’t be the “facts,” or Berman would never have read such drivel. He would have said to himself, “Population up, potato consumption down, how can anyone be complaining that we’re eating too many potatoes?”

The “expert” was a female who probably doesn’t have any kids of her own to feed, or if she does, probably had them raised and fed by an illegal alien nanny, so she could pursue her high-powered career as an innumerate “expert.” Maybe she just doesn’t like potatoes, and is seeking to pass off her personal predilection as an “expert” opinion. The other talking head in the piece was Sen. Susan Collins.

In the other few stories we saw on GMA, before The Boss continued her channel-surfing, all of the “role models” in each story were women.

I think what was going on here was that the producer of the piece was a feminist, and the whole point of the piece was not to inform, which it miserably failed to do, but to have all experts and persons of importance depicted by females, no matter how moronic they sounded. Score another victory for feminism’s never-ending war for girl power, and for the dumbing down of America!