Humanities desk
< August 29	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	August 31 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 30

Tinned potatoes

A couple of weeks ago on breakfast TV, food blogger Jack Monroe prepared a meal for a group of food critics created entirely out of tinned ingredients. The critics sang the praises of the meal before they were told where it had come from. Very funny, but when challenged on the cost, Monroe made the extraordinary claim that tinned potatoes were cheaper than fresh. I thought this was dubious, but I see that Tesco are selling 567g tins of Tesco Everyday Value New Potatoes for 20p. How can that possibly be? Surely the metal in the tin is worth that much, let alone the cost of cleaning, peeling, and sealing the potatoes in the tin. SpinningSpark 17:10, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fresh foods always cost more than canned because of losses due to spoilage. The consumer (not the farmer, the warehouse, nor the merchant) bears the cost of losses due to spoilage. When you pay XXX for a fresh potato, you're actually buying that potato, plus all of the potatoes that rotted before anyone could buy them. Since canning prevents spoilage, canned, frozen, or preserved goods tend to cost less per unit weight than fresh. Here is a good related article. --Jayron 32 17:45, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, also keep in mind transportation and storage can cost more for fresh veggies, though the difference is probably bigger for fragile things like tomatoes, compared to relatively tough potatoes. Here's a nice document from the USDA: [1] "How Much Do Fruits and Vegetables Cost?" It has great data (for the USA), as well as comparisons and discussion of fresh, frozen, canned, etc. Here [2] is a highly detailed analysis of food loss and food waste from the FAO, with information on how loss and waste occur in fresh and canned goods. (In general, for any food-related question, putting FAO or USDA into searches can really increase the quality and reliability of results ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 19:01, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note that while these may be cheap, if we ignore convience & cost (time etc) of you peeling or scrubbing potatoes yourself are they actually cheaper to the general consumer? It doesn't seem clear cut to me provided you use enough potatoes. The tin is 345g when drained. Meanwhile I'm seeing 4kg of potatoes for £1.90 [3] and 7.50kg for £3.50 [4]. There will be some loss, the amount depending on whether you peel or scrub, the quality of the potatoes, how long you keep them etc. Still provided you use these in ~3 weeks (probably longer), you could potentially get at least 3.5kg equivalent or 6.5kg equivalent. That means ~54 pence/kg vs the 58 pence/kg for the canned potatoes. Nil Einne (talk) 03:52, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The potatoes you link are cheap, but they are not new potatoes. The difference between the tinned price and the price of fresh new potatoes is much more dramatic. SpinningSpark 07:11, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

But that's assuming you need new potatoes. If you just want potatoes, can you find canned potatoes cheaper? The specific claim you mentioned is "tinned potatoes were cheaper than fresh" not "tinned new potatoes were cheaper than fresh". Or to put it a different way, maybe Monroe was right, but I'm not seeing it from the evidence presented. New potatoes are of course the sort of thing that are extremely seasonal and don't survive well in ordinary storage and also somewhat delicate and so more suited to canning. Nil Einne (talk) 09:42, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

New potatoes also small, so you can actually get them in a tin. As a side issue, the supermarket's profit on each tin may be very small, as the chains compete with each other on this sort of product. These tins of very cheap "value" vegetables only appeared in the UK about 20 years ago - see The Great Baked Bean War Of The 1990s - resulting in baked beans being sold at their lowest price for 101 years (1996). Alansplodge (talk) 10:17, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Potatoes are just really, really cheap. The cheapest way to buy them is in a sack from the farm gate (usually needs a car though) as you're buying the most potato and the least of any supplementary cost. In a supermarket though, you're probably paying as much for lighting and advertising as you are for the spud.

Through a "typical" supply chain, it's entirely credible that the costs of a modern hyper-efficient UK supermarket can tin potatoes and then ship them more cheaply as a robust long-lived product than they can as a pampered perishable fresh product, with high wastage and the UK's enormous wastage rates around cosmetic standards for fresh produce. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:26, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If one has the time and a patch of dirt, they're also essentially free. Plant a potato, wait a few weeks, collect a bunch of potatoes. Eat some, plant some more, rinse and repeat. Potato gardens are among the easiest for someone to maintain in their back yard. You just have to redistribute the soil once in a while (called "hilling") Here are some tips. --Jayron 32 12:23, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Have you grown and eaten a lot of your own potatoes? In my experience, gardening only leads to high yields with low effort in the minds of people who haven't done much of it. Even if you have appropriate soil, exposure, climate and precipitation (which a lot of the world does not), you have a host of critters who will be working against you. Sure, gardening is fun and sometimes has delicious rewards, but it's only "free" if you don't count labor costs, irrigation costs, opportunity costs, and the costs associated with pest management. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:45, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, most of that isn't money-out-of-pocket. --Jayron 32 16:50, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I grew potatoes in the 70's, planted them in the spring. We got huge handsome tomato-less tomato plants out of them. And a return of about <20% by mass on the spuds. μηδείς (talk) 20:09, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Grow spuds in the same piece of ground for more than three years and the accumulated viral load will wipe out the fourth crop, and there's no way to kill the viruses. My family used to grow potatoes, amongst other crops, on a fairly substantial scale (hundreds of hectares under irrigation). The hassle and cost of rotation, pest control, harvesting, packaging and handling led to them abandoning potatoes permanently about ten years ago. Wheat, maize and peanuts are far easier and cheaper to produce. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:20, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have been properly corrected. Thank you all for adding something useful the discussion.--Jayron 32 20:26, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Back to original question - why are tinned potatoes so cheap? Well, if they're from Europe, perhaps it's the result of the Common Agricultural Policy which heavily subsidises this stuff, resulting in much food being grown which cannot be sold at market prices - it needs to be "dumped" on world markets at less than the real cost of production - see Dumping_(pricing_policy)#European_Union_and_Common_Agricultural_Policy. So the price for that tin of potatoes is by no means a "free market" price, but rather a "heavily subsidised" one. Fresh produce, on the other hand, is harder to export (it will spoil over a long sea journey), thus this situation is less likely to arise. 110.140.193.164 (talk) 13:23, 3 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, the example I originally linked is from the UK which, for the time being at least, is still within the European Union. The low price is therefore not due to EU dumping on world markets. There are similar price differentials at Walmart in the USA. A 15oz tin of value sliced new potatoes sells for 68 cents, which is cheaper than they are selling fresh potatoes. SpinningSpark 14:15, 3 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Location of Mouhajirya/Mouhajiria/Mehajeria in Sudan

Hi,

I'm looking for the exact location of the place called Mouhajirya, Mouhajiria or Mehajeria in Sudan, mentioned (under these names) in only a few places like [5] and [6].

Thanks. Apokrif (talk) 19:28, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This article has a map, with a red dot, indicating it to be a location in South Darfur. It appears to lie between Nyala and Haskanita, probably close to the border between South Darfur and East Darfur. --Jayron 32 19:59, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Muhajariyya, Sudan. Try a fuzzy gazetteer.—eric 09:30, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting: if you zoom in, it seems that people have build a square fence around each of their huts, in a very disciplined way, to show the limits of the land they own/claim to own. At first I thought it was an artifact of the picture, but they do look like real fences. In such a remote area, I wouldn't have expected that, I would instead have expected just huts next to one another. I obviously am guilty of underestimating how hut-living people formally organised the sharing of the land in a village. --Lgriot (talk) 13:58, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The location of the place called Muhajeria here seems to match the place on the RFI map. Apokrif (talk) 15:53, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Corrals are common where forage is limited and the population depends on livestock not held in common (e.g., each family has its own goat). I know nothing of who lives here, but obviously they are not like the Maasai to the less arid SE who maintain large herds of cattle owned in common by the clan. μηδείς (talk) 20:04, 31 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]