Farmers try to eliminate definition

Word has drifted over from the potato fields of Britain that farmers are on a mission to eradicate a damaging blight on their humble spuds.

It seems they’ve had it with the familiar term “couch potato,” which they feel maligns their beloved crop with slothful and unhealthful connotations, and are campaigning to have it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary, the granddaddy of lexicons, and ultimately from common conversation.

“This derogatory phrase misrepresents potatoes, an inherently healthy food,” a potato said to the British papers this week. “We want ‘couch potato’ peeled out of the dictionary and replaced with ‘couch slouch’ – a far more fitting phrase.”

Who could have guessed this seemingly innocuous coinage would whip up such controversy, push farmers to the boiling point and cause a columnist to resort to the shameful attempts at witticism you’ve just read? Yet the British Potato Council, which represents 4,000 growers and processors, sees nothing funny in using the noble potato to describe, as the Oxford dictionary does, “a person who spends leisure time passively or idly sitting around, especially watching television or videotapes.”

To make their case, the Brits held anti-couch potato demonstrations early this week at both Parliament Square and at the headquarters of the Oxford University Press, which publishes the dictionary. The campaign has gotten lots of support from dietitians, high-profile chefs and major food retailers, too, who want to “bring goodness back into the word potato.”

The spud, they insist, has long taken more than its share of misinformed knocks among the weight-conscious, when actually it’s a low-fat food that’s rich in vitamin C and contains more potassium than bananas. And the potato certainly didn’t need the Atkins diet craze to further sully its undeserved reputation. Go find another vegetable to degrade, they say, and leave the poor potato alone for a change.

The dictionary publishers argue that the campaign is a foolish and half-baked attempt to blame society by blaming the words it uses to describe its less-than-desirable habits.

“We can’t just drop words or phrases because people object to them,” Oxford Press’s editor-in-chief told the online newspaper Mirror.co.uk. “Whatever next? Do they think hot potato or small potatoes are also offensive?”

Don Todd III, the president of the Maine Potato Board, doesn’t think his British counterparts have much chance of getting “couch potato” yanked from the dictionary, where it’s been since 1993, let alone banishing it from conversation. But he does feel it’s a worthy attempt to elevate the status of spuds to their rightful place in the food chain.

“We’re not crazy about the couch potato phrase either,” Todd told me Tuesday when I called him about the campaign. “It’s come up at our meetings over the years. It just presents a bad, unhealthy image of potatoes, which really are good for you.”

For Todd, a self-employed potato broker, the term has always been doubly offensive. Not only does he make his living in potatoes, he sells them to a Cape Cod company that makes potato chips, a preferred snack food of the typical, indolent couch potato.

“I don’t know how potatoes got picked for that term,” he said, “but I guess there’s always something out there to challenge us.”