Berlin is a great place to observe policies with good intentions, yet negative second-order effects.

Distributing free potatoes will likely cause waste somewhere else, as e.g. people will buy less potatoes in supermarkets. The waste just becomes less visible as supermarkets dispose of food every day.

Another current exhibit is the prohibition of using salt for removing snow and ice from the pavements because it's "bad for plants and the ground water". While that is true to some degree, the Berlin policy conveniently ignores all second-order effects: Sidewalks are more slippery, more people get hurt. I see people slipping on snow-compacted ice almost every day. How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?

You can apply for an exemption though, e.g. if you plan to use salt on a driveway to a hospital. Processing fees for such an exemption are up to 1.4k€ [1].

The rent cap is another one. But let's go there another day..

[1] https://www.berlin.de/umwelt/themen/natur-pflanzen-artenschu...

Distributing (trucking, rent and employees at grocery stores, etc) the potatoes costs more than growing them. Even if they are available for free at the farm, the market price in the city cannot go below the cost of distribution without grocery stores and shipping companies working for free, which they have no reason to do. These are already some of the lowest-margin businesses out there.

In this case, it seems that Berliner Morgenpost and Ecosia are doing shipping and distribution for free, for PR reasons or maybe as some kind of charitable volunteering project. It's nice of them to volunteer their time, but it seems strange to talk about “a story about the absurdities of our food system”. Are they saying that it is absurd that a newspaper doesn't permanently turn into a money-losing grocery distributor?

Hopefully it’s real this time: https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...

This is an interesting example of what happens when the supply and demand curve goes into the extreme ends of the chart: The price of "selling" your product goes negative. It costs money to get rid of it.

Negative prices occur from time to time in the electricity market because some types of power plants are slow to ramp up and down. So if demand falls too rapidly, spot electricity prices can negative.

Unless there’s some funny unit issue going on (I know there are short and long tons…), it looks like Germany consumed around 5000KT of potatoes in 2022.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/potato-co...

> A farm in Saxony has been left with 4,000 tons of potatoes in what Berliner Morgenpost is calling “a story about the absurdities of our food system”.

I dunno; it doesn’t seem too absurd, better to have too many than too few potatoes.

>4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms

It is exactly four million kilograms. (Germany uses the SI metric ton)

A farm on the western side of Canada has been doing something similar for years:

https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...

Good on them for going through the trouble to make sure they’re not wasted

Potatoes have low caloric density (80 kcal/100 g), so the ideal would be to dry them and store them in a sustainable form like ready-to-use mash.

At 2000 kcal/day average caloric expenditure, you could feed 1.6 million people for a day. Or 3.2 if it was only half the diet. That's a lot of food indeed!

The problem is most of the volume/weight is water; that's not very convenient. In comparison, an equivalent volume of cereals would feed 7 million people and are much easier to store long term, they are very efficient !

That could be a big potato battery bank?

According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah

    4000 tonnes = 4,000,000 kg = 4,000,000,000 g

    num potatoes = 4,000,000,000 / 200 = 20,000,000 potatoes

    volts = 20,000,000 x 0.5v = 10,000,000 volts (10megavolts)

current would stay the same at 0.2mah

I am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?

3 days ago I paid €0.79/kg in Slovakia.

When life give you potatoes, make vodka… or?

These particular potatoes won't be wasted.

But other potatoes likely will be.

It's not like people are suddenly going to want more potatoes.

> 4,000 tons

I did some math out of curiosity to better visualize this amount in my head. If we assume that a typical serving of potatoes in a meal where potatoes are an important part is 200g, then with 4 million kg of potatoes you can make 20 million of such meals (1/4 of Germany's population).

That’s fun! The distribution points are too far from me, and getting the free potatoes would be completely impractical, but I am sure some people will benefit.

They should take them to France so they can become… you know the rest, but now I wonder how much weight the oil would add to 4k tons of potatoes.

Ultimately this may just move the wastage somehwere else: people may get those for free instead of buying them, leading to waste in supermarkets/shops. Or they might take more than they need because it's free and end up throwing them away.

It seems that they acknowledge that they are doing thus because there is a supply glut so potatoes will go to waste in any case...

Ultimately this give away is a waste of efforts, too. Sometimes there is just nothing to be done...

I prefer to think of it as 4 kilotons.

I’ve wondered if something like this would drive down inflation in the US food supply.

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I would want at least a ton of ketchup with that.

4000 tons or 4096 tons of potatoes?

Is this what life in Europe has come to?

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In America, we just let people go hungry while grinding the excess crop back into fertilizer.

This is great news to me.

"4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms"

this is awesome, potatoes are so good for you

sigh Why am I never where the excitement is?

this might cause major financial damage to "traditional local markets"(1) and similar in Berlin and Brandenburg close to it (depending on what kind of potatoes this are, like quality, taste, how the cook (hard, soft), etc.)

(1): Kinda a bit like local farmer markets, but also very different.

the problem isn't the giving away stuff for free part

but the scale of it

I mean giving free stuff to people in need is always grate, irrelevant of scale.

Giving it to people which can easily afford it on small scale is just fine too.

Giving it to people which can easily afford it on gigantic scale and it's only slightly hurting the bottom line of some huge cooperation, then who cares.

But giving away a product people might have bought from smaller local businesses in very larger amounts (more then what such small 1-2 person businesses sell in multiple month), that is where your "charitable" action might cost people their job and you might do far more harm then good.

now Germans are picky about their potato and the chance that 4k Tons of free potato are the kind of potato you find in "local traditional markets" is pretty slim. So this might all just be very hypothetical.

Ich bin ein Berliner

This is so sad. I'm sure there is some way to turn them into biofuel. Instead they are just a snack to people that will not even appreciate it

While this give-away sounds cool...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank#Germany

https://www.wfp.org/countries/ukraine