Potatoes are one of the most versatile foods in the pantry. They can be fried, boiled, mashed or deep-fried. The UF Horticultural Sciences Graduate Student Club teamed up to sell the versatile vegetable to their campus.
These graduate students spent Thursday and Friday selling their goods outside of Fifield Hall on Hull Road by the Southwest Recreation Center.
When they started, they had a large blue trailer filled with two tons of starch-stocked produce. After selling three-quarters of their supply, they donated the remaining produce to the local Bread of the Mighty Food Bank. The potatoes came from the Hastings Research and Demonstration unit in Hastings, which is near St. Augustine.
The students harvested 10 different kinds of potatoes out of about 200 varieties at the Hastings facility, said Libby Rens, president of the Horticultural Sciences Graduate Student Club. She said the group sells the crops so students at UF "can get their hands on real Florida-grown food."
The club has been selling fruits and vegetables at UF for at least 10 years. The potatoes sold for 50 cents per pound and people could buy a large 75-pound sack for $20.
The novelty of the side-of-the-road spud sale was an attraction to people passing by.
A van full of UF employees stopped at the sale only because they had never seen one before and wanted to participate. They weren't the only ones. Rens said many people who came by said they hadn't seen one before either.
One of the students' professors, Brantlee Richter, came to the sale to help out the cause - and to grab some potatoes for making latkes, the traditional potato pancake.
Some people walked away with five pounds of potatoes, and others ended up with about 225 pounds of potatoes.
The potatoes are not the big money makers, but the sale is just to promote the club and to meet the market, Rens said.
The money earned from the sale will go toward sponsoring travel grants for students in the club.
