Tuber, or not tuber?
In 1966, artist Andy Warhol supposedly said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In 1977, the late David Bowie coined the phrase, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”
But whether it be for 15 minutes or 24 hours, let’s just accept for the few minutes it takes to read this column that many gain fame for however short a period.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present “Dug.”
Dug first surfaced – literally – in August 2021 when New Zealander Colin Craig-Brown struck something hard while digging in his garden. Craig-Brown continued shoveling until he had unearthed what looked like a mammoth potato. Colin was brave enough to taste a small, raw sample of the object and found that it did, indeed, taste much like a potato. Colin and his wife, Donna, quickly dubbed the object Dug – after all, that’s how they’d found him.
But rather than carve up Dug, who weighed 17.4 pounds, and serve him alongside a very large steak, the couple decided that they might have something very special on their hands. So they froze Dug, who had started to deteriorate, and contacted Guinness World Records. Guinness told Colin that the previous record for “world’s largest potato” belonged to a man in the United Kingdom who in 2011 grew a potato weighing 11 pounds. It looked as though the Craig-Brown’s (potato) salad days were at hand. But first, Dug would have to undergo testing.
Guinness has very strict rules for determining the validity of any item or act that may set a world record. Many have failed. For example, in 2008 in Croatia, 395 men tried to break the world record for the largest assembly of Smurfs. They painted themselves blue and assembled on the banks of the Cetina River in Split, confident that they would far surpass the previous record of 291 Smurfs. But on the day of their effort, they discovered that a new record of 451 Smurfs had been set the previous year by students at Warwick University in England. Smurfs down, dude!
Wary of certifying a half-baked claim, Guinness ran DNA testing on Dug and, seven months later, contacted the Craig-Browns by email.
“Sadly,” Guinness wrote, “the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”
A tuber acts as sort of an underground tank that stores water to help plants regrow after a harsh winter.
One can only imagine the couple’s disappointment. After all, they had constructed a small wagon with which to transport Dug, who quickly became a neighborhood sensation and a favorite of the couple’s grandchildren. Who knows? Had Maury Povich not decided to retire, Dug might have appeared on the popular American afternoon reality show – audience members waiting, chairs at the ready, to see who Dug’s Spud Daddy was.
Undaunted by Guinness, Colin did further research and concluded that Dug is probably a type of choko, a cucumber-like fruit that also grew in the Craig-Browns’ garden. Apparently one dead giveaway of Dug’s non-spudness was that he had no “eyes” sprouting.
Colin told media that he still occasionally pulls Dug out from cold storage and lets his grandchildren feast their eyes.
In other words, they dig Dug.