Consider the humble potato. We’ve long been a nation of potato eaters, but they were largely baked or boiled. Anyone who has made fries from scratch knows what a pain it is, with all the peeling, cutting, and splattering. But with sophisticated machinations of mechanization, french fry production became centralized so fries could be shipped at -40°F to any fast-food deep-fat fryer or supermarket frozen food section in the country to become America’s favorite vegetable. Nearly all the increase in potato consumption in recent decades has been in the forms of french fries and potato chips.
