Oh wow, I felt like I was reading my own kid's writing for a moment, as this is very much our situation. They get tired of hearing my long-winded tangents of potatoes being the ultimate food, and of course, my particular affection for mashed potatoes. I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk, and I never bothered fact checking that despite me repeating it to them often - and asking guess what's made of potatoes and milk?

That aside, I'm guessing the author's aversion as a child is strictly texture based which is fair. Don't get me wrong, fresh prepared is better, but instant potatoes, especially the Idahoan brand, taste exactly the same to me. It's just that they're too perfectly thin and uniform, quite unnaturally so.

Some commenters allege that the author and his father prepared the instant mashed potatoes wrong; in particular, they dumped boiling water directly onto the flakes, which the directions on the package say not to do.

I, too, love the potato. I like to boil them with broth, oil, lemon juice, and garlic and spices, then lightly roast to finish.

> I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk

Protein is not a monolith; it's nine different compounds that are needed, for humans. Meat has all of them. But most plant foods do not. A person will eventually starve from lysine deficiency if they eat nothing but wheat, rice, millet, most grains really. Even though these are rich in protein. That might be why bread and rice is so often paired with beans; beans are rich in lysine and the combination covers all the bases.

One of the proteins that the potato lacks relatively is methionine; a large active adult man needs perhaps 1 - 2 gram of methionine per day. Potatoes have about 500 mg methionine per kg. That works out to some 2 - 4 kg of potatoes a day and some 1500 - 3000 calories to go with it. (Plausible enough, if you ask me. When I was younger and worked a labour job burning lots of energy I would cook a 2 kg bag of potatoes and they'd be gone in a couple days.) It does seem nothing but boiled potatoes, salt and maybe a multi-vitamin and some fat, will keep a person going more or less indefinitely. I can't do the mostly-potato diet myself anymore though. I would get very fat.

There is a digression early in Knut Hamsun's novel Growth of the Soil, where for a paragraph or two he goes on about how great potatoes are and also mentions the same thing about man needing just potatoes and milk.

It's an incredible novel, and I have read it periodically since I was a teen, with so many great musings on the meaning of life but I always remember the passage on potatoes. Couldn't for the life of me tell you why that's stuck in my head so much.

EDIT

What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve. Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside. Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato — a blessed thing!

Wonderful