Kids Were Offered Candy Or Potatoes For Halloween ― Guess Which Won?

Imagine you’re a kid on Halloween. You’ve spent weeks planning your costume, you’ve walked approximately 400 miles around the neighborhood, you knock on another door, ready to collect your next chocolate bar, and the person standing there offers you a potato.

Videos by Sporked

A real-life, raw potato. The kind you’d find rolling around at the bottom of a grocery bag.

I’d have been absolutely gobsmacked and just stared at the root for a few minutes while I regained my bearings.

But it turns out that quite a few American children are perfectly happy to receive vegetables for Halloween. The Idaho Potato Commission decided to test this rather peculiar phenomenon on October 31st, conducting a nationwide experiment that gave trick-or-treaters a choice between candy and an Idaho potato.

And the results were considerably more entertaining than anyone had any right to expect.

Potatoes Beat Halloween Candy In North Dakota

The experiment, called Trick or Tater, involved 15 households across 13 states. Each participating home offered trick-or-treaters the same choice: candy or a raw Idaho potato. I would’ve assumed the potatoes were there for comic relief. Something to make the kids laugh before they reached for the candy. But at Kayla Dornfeld’s home in Fargo, North Dakota, trick-or-treaters took 137 potatoes, compared with just 67 pieces of candy.

That’s more than twice as many potatoes as pieces of candy.

I need to know what was happening in Fargo that night. Were these particularly impressive potatoes? Had the children collectively decided they wanted to make mashed potatoes for dinner?

Or maybe it was simply the novelty of it all. After you’ve collected your 47th miniature chocolate bar, another piece of candy probably isn’t going to change your life. But a potato? That’s something you can march home and proudly announce to your parents. “LOOK WHAT I GOT!”

I suspect the appeal has less to do with a sudden nationwide enthusiasm for root vegetables and more to do with the fact that children, much like the rest of us, enjoy a bit of nonsense. And North Dakota wasn’t the only place where potatoes enjoyed an unexpected moment of glory.

One Man Handed Out 200 Pounds Of Potatoes In 97 Minutes

In Pennsylvania, Patrick Foy has been offering trick-or-treaters a choice between candy and potatoes for more than 20 years.

Twenty years! That’s an extraordinary amount of dedication to a joke that most people would probably abandon after the first Halloween.

This year, Foy handed out 200 pounds of Idaho potatoes in just 97 minutes. He ran out of potatoes while he still had candy left.

And the children weren’t merely accepting their potatoes out of politeness. According to the Idaho Potato Commission, some held their spuds above their heads like trophies, while others ran through their neighborhoods shouting about the potato house.

Did Candy Win Anywhere?

Yes, and I’d be slightly concerned if it hadn’t.

At first-time participant Kinsey Amezcua’s home in Idaho, trick-or-treaters took 73 pieces of candy, compared with 28 potatoes. So candy maintained a comfortable lead there, although the fact that potatoes accounted for more than a quarter of the treats taken is still remarkable.

The experiment also attracted some wonderfully eccentric participants. In Colorado, children’s author and illustrator Kaz Windness drew faces on potatoes and offered them for adoption as “pets.”

The Idaho Potato Commission is already inviting people to get involved in next year’s Trick or Tater experiment, so this may not be the last we hear of Halloween potatoes.

And while I still think I’d choose a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup over a raw potato, I have to admit the children have made a compelling case. After all, candy is gone in a few bites. A potato could become fries, mashed potatoes, or a baked potato loaded with cheese.