...noodle soup, turkey with boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, rice, pickles and cucumber salad

Steak, which stands for a Mubarak-Ben Ali type of military police dictatorship, or a potato, which stands for a Tehran type of theocracies.

And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May -- this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above.

I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant -- I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was -- and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it.

Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread.

And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well.