PO-TA-TO POT-AY-TO POT-AH-TO PO-TET

Then it crossed the Atlantic, and Europe took one look and recoiled. The same lumpy, suspect tuber, this time related, suspiciously, to deadly nightshade. The French declared it fit only for pigs. The Russians called it the devil's apple. For two centuries the potato sat in European soil being deeply mistrusted by absolutely everyone.

Enter Frederick the Great. Eighteenth-century Prussia, a king with a famine problem and peasants who would rather starve than eat the strange brown lump he kept telling them to plant. So Frederick did what any sensible monarch would do. He planted royal potato fields. He posted armed guards around them. And then, the story goes, he quietly told the guards to look the other way when peasants came to nick them, on the cracking logic that anything worth guarding was worth stealing. The peasants stole. The potato spread. Frederick is still buried at Sanssouci, where to this day people leave potatoes on his grave.

In Norway, we went the other way entirely. We didn't crown the potato, we adopted it. Folded it into the language. Call someone a potet in Norwegian and you're saying something quietly lovely: that they're versatile, dependable, can be slotted into anything. A whole national personality, smuggled into a vegetable.

Then, in 1952, Hasbro slid a small cardboard box onto suburban American shop shelves. Inside: a pair of plastic eyes, two ears, a moustache, a pipe, a felt hat at a rakish angle, and absolutely no toy. The toy, said the box, was at the bottom of your mum's vegetable drawer. Bring your own potato.

Mr. Potato Head rolling into town. The first toy ever advertised on network television, beamed into living rooms where families had only just worked out how to switch the thing on. A generation of American children dragged kitchen chairs to the table, fished a King Edward out of the larder, and spent the afternoon stabbing it with a face. They went on to run the world.

Half a century later in the Herefordshire countryside, a bankrupt farmer called William Chase had a batch of potatoes rejected by a supermarket for being the wrong shape. The same potatoes ended up at Kettle Chips, who said they were the best they had ever tasted. Chase took the hint and stopped trying to sell potatoes altogether. He flew to Amish Pennsylvania to learn how to fry, bought a second-hand fryer, and converted a potato shed on his farm into a small factory. He called the crisps Tyrrells, after the farm. Hand-cooked, posh, with a quirky black-and-white photograph on the bag. He walked them straight past Tesco into Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges. Six years later he sold a majority stake for £40m. Then, with the potatoes still on the farm, he started a distillery and made vodka, which he eventually sold to Diageo too. Some people just have a way with a spud.

And right now, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, a man called Ben Newman is doing what he has been doing since 2001: splitting jacket potatoes open with a knife, watching the steam come up, and loading them with cheese and beans for the lunchtime crowd. In late 2023, the TikTok algorithm wandered past his stall and decided he was the protagonist. The queues turned into hours, then into a tourist attraction. People now fly in from Sydney to queue for his lunch. He didn't change a thing.

Pot-ay-to. Pot-ah-to. Po-tet. The potato has barely changed since the Andes. It's beige. It's lumpy. It is, frankly, a bit boring. What changes is us.

Look at what we did to the thing. We worshipped it. We crowned it. We guarded it. We turned it into a compliment. We built a toy out of an absent one. We sold it back to ourselves in a posh bag for triple the price. We made vodka out of it. We queued for it on TikTok. We are, collectively, completely unhinged about a tuber.

And here's the bit that's actually quite brilliant. None of this is rocket science. We didn't invent any of it with engineers or focus groups. We did it the way humans do everything interesting: by playing. By holding three or four mutually contradictory ideas about the same lump in our heads at the same time and not minding. By noticing how something is seen now and idly wondering how else it could be seen. By being magnificently illogical minds somehow manufacturing meaning out of perfectly ordinary stuff and collectively agreeing on its value.

This leap of imagination and meaning gives us frames to reinvent, play with context, and create more relevant value… but it's still a potato.

Hasbro shipped the potato without the potato. We brought the rest.

Discover more about this by reading further about Brand/OS, or bring us your potatoes and we can cook something up together.