Sweet spuds not just for Thanksgiving anymore

"After generations of being smothered by a blanket of marshmallows on Thanksgiving and then forgotten for another 11 months, the irrepressible sweet potato is having its moment," Kim Severson reports from North Carolina for The New York Times. "American farmers expect to harvest a record two billion pounds this year, almost half of that here in the nation’s most prolific sweet potato state. Sweet potatoes have achieved a status that just a few years ago would have seemed laughable. They may even be hip."

The shift is much about nutrition, and a different sort of French fries. "Sweet potatoes have become the darling of the diabetic and weight-loss set, a lifeline for parents whose children demand fries for nearly every meal and a boon for Southern farmers who are looking to replace tobacco," Severson writes. "The sweet potato fry is getting so popular that research has shown almost half the children in America under 12 have tried one. To meet demand, American farmers are planting more, chain restaurants are rewriting menus and ConAgra this month opened a $155 million plant dedicated to processing frozen sweet potato products — the first of its kind in the world." (Times photo by Jeremy Lange)

Clare Hasler, a nutrition expert at the University of California, Davis, summed up the sweet potato's nutritional wonders for the Times: “It’s a vegetable that has protein, which is fairly unusual, but it also has complex carbohydrates that don’t spike insulin.” (Read more)