Potatoes

I stumbled upon this rather interesting brief history of the impact of the potato.  Yeah, I know, pretty weird.  But really interesting.  I had no idea it was such a maligned food in so many places.  I was also surprised to learn how Europeans viewed vegetables.  http://www.history-magazine.com/potato.html

I was actually looking for the Frederick the Great story, which is in this article.  It turns out Frederick felt that the Prussians should be growing potatoes, but the people didn't appreciate them and resisted.  So he created a royal garden, planted potatoes and stationed armed guards around it.  The peasants figured anything that well guarded must be worth stealing, so they did.  And eventually they were accepted and cultivated broadly.

That made me think of the Ataturk ploy in Turkey in the 1920's where he tried to get women to stop wearing veils.  Nothing worked, so instead he instituted a law that all prostitutes MUST wear veils.  Pretty soon, veil wearing decreased substantially.

Gotta love political leaders clever enough to try reverse psychology!