26Rotting Potatoes
In 2013, an eight-year-old girl in Russia found the bodies of her parents, brother, and grandmother in a basement after they were poisoned by gas from rotting potatoes.
27. Potato chips were invented in 1853 when a cook got fed up with a customer sending his fried potatoes back to the kitchen for being too soggy. To spite the customer, he sliced the potato as thin as he could, deep-fried them to hell, and dumped piles of salt on them. They were instantly loved.
28. Onions are eaten and grown in more countries than any other vegetable, with at least 175 countries producing an onion crop and unlike wheat (the largest global crop by area harvested), the onion is a staple of every major cuisine.
29. Though potatoes are native to the Americas, the majority of the world’s potatoes are now grown in Asia, and that though soybeans are native to Asia, the majority of the world’s soybeans are now grown in the Americas.
30. The potato has been studied by NASA as an important food source for long space voyages, and that the number of potato plants (grown onboard a space ship) needed to sustain one astronaut is also the number of potato plants required to process the air breathed by one astronaut.
