On March 24, 1756, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, issued a royal decree.
The decree was about potatoes.
It is known in German as the Kartoffelbefehl — “the potato order” — and the Daily Spud is required, in the interest of historical accuracy, to report it without further comment.
The decree itself
The Kartoffelbefehl mandated the cultivation of potatoes across the Kingdom of Prussia.
The text classified the potato as “a very nutritious food supplement” and instructed Prussian peasants to grow it.
The decree was issued in response to a recurring problem in eighteenth-century Europe: the population, when offered the potato, kept refusing to eat it.
Frederick’s solution was to make it the law.
The Potato King
Frederick is remembered in Germany by a title earned through this decree: Kartoffelkönig — “the Potato King.”
The Daily Spud notes, without editorializing, that this is among the more flattering nicknames a monarch can earn.
To this day, visitors to his grave at Sanssouci leave potatoes on the headstone in his memory.
This is not a metaphor. They leave actual potatoes.
The legend the Daily Spud is required to flag
There is a widely-repeated story that Frederick, frustrated with peasant resistance to the potato, established royal potato fields ringed by guards.
The guards, by his order, were instructed to perform a deliberately incompetent watch.
Per the legend, peasants — calculating that anything a king guards must be valuable, and that anything badly-guarded must be stealable — promptly stole the potatoes and planted their own.
This story is probably not true.
It is told about Frederick. It is also told, almost verbatim, about Antoine-Augustin Parmentier in France. Both versions appear primarily in retellings rather than primary sources.
The Kartoffelbefehl itself, however, is a matter of record.
Editorial position
The Daily Spud regards the Kartoffelbefehl as the historical precedent for the modern Potato Pledge.
A royal decree binding subjects to the cultivation of the potato is, in essence, what the Pledge is — minus the kingdom, plus a 20% discount code.
We are not the first to make subjects pledge allegiance to a starch. We are continuing a tradition.
Take the pledge. The Kartoffelbefehl bound a kingdom. The Pledge binds a tribe.