I like them, but I keep getting hassled about it.
People tell me they aren’t clean, or won’t be digested, etc.
Yet, they have no problem eating radishes, kohlrabi, or carrots uncooked.
It’s not really a matter of digestion, but a risk of salmonella. Everyone I grew up with ate raw potatoes and noone ever got sick from them, but now they say it’s a problem. Same thing with raw eggs.
They can’t be that bad for you. Scientists have experimented with using raw potatoes as a base for people to consume a vaccine for e. coli.
However, there have also been cases where Clostridium botulinum has been found on the skin of raw potatoes. However, what made people sick was cooking the potatoes in foil which didn’t heat the potato sufficiently to kill the nasty stuff and instead made it germinate and thrive.
This botulism scare occurred in El Paso, TX back in 1994. 30 people came down with symptoms.
My son used to steal them pout of the cart and gnaw on them with his baby teeth. Very unattractive, what with the dirty drool running down his chin, but it never bothered him at all. And he consumed quite a bit sometimes.
“OUT of the cart”
DUH!
Wish I could provide a link or a book or something, but I’m gonna have to rely on memory here: long ago, I recall seeing electron-microscope pictures of potatoes. The captions said that, when potatoes are cooked, or brought to a certain temperature, the little sealed cells ‘pop’ and release the digestible starches therein.
What I draw from this is that eating raw potatoes probably doesn’t provide you with much nutrition; the starches are still sealed up in their indigestible cellulose containers and probably pass through you largely unscathed. Still, it’s better than absorbing the ‘nutrition’ from Cheetos, so munch away.
In general, raw vegetables of any sort are OK, as long as they’re clean. Of course, they may taste really funny, or be otherwise unpalatable, but they shouldn’t make you sick.
just don’t eat the sprouts… 
Yeah, the green potatoes are the bad ones. Stay away from the green potatoes.
We used to eat raw potatos. Mum used to say don’t buy candy buy an apple. We’d say "Why a raw potato tastes the same and we can get that for free. So we ate them to prove it.
Looking back we were really weird kids. But we always made egg nog with raw eggs and ate cake batter and never got sick.
Another childhood memory gone…
This raises a question – how much of the food scares going on today are new problems, and how much are new discoveries?
For example, the raw oyster scare came about because scientists discovered a bacterium on raw oysters that can cause illness/death in those who already have liver problems. The interesting thing is that scientists believe that this bacterium was always there, and always caused a few deaths a year, but people thought the deaths were caused by the underlying liver disease.
So, what’s the story about samonella and e coli? Are they more widespread than before, new strains of bactieria, or are we just more aware of the danger?
Sua
E. coli has been around for at least as long as humans have (it’s one of the intestinal bacteria essential for proper digestion), but I’m pretty sure that most strains are harmless. I don’t know how long the dangerous ones have been around, but it’s unlikely that they just appeared in the last few decades.
The only problem is that they taste a lot better cooked. I don’t see how raw ones could be less safe to eat than any other raw vegetable.
Merlot sneaks cube of raw potato from pot on stove as Mom prepares dinner
“Don’t eat that!..it’ll give you worms.”
Merlot grabs another cube for the road.
