Frederick the Great was the longest reigning King of Prussia - 46 years he wore the crown. And he was broadly accepted to be a very accomplished King - modernising Prussia, improve the state bureaucracy and upward mobility, and winning many wars. So why is it that what crowns the grave of the respected king today are... potatoes?
Did the Great King enjoy fries so much the people wanted him to have a perpetual supply even in the afterlife? Was he the first ever version of Mr Potato Head? Nope.
Frederick was the King that introduced the potato to Prussia. Introduced the pota.. Frederick did what? Who cares if he introduced a root vegetable? Why should I be reading this? What a "potatic" story this is! As it turns out, the really interesting bit is not the potato itself, but Frederick's deep understanding of human nature and his ingenuity in overcoming the resistance
Frederick saw 2 major benefits for Prussia to consume the potato. First, it would be an alternate carbohydrate source to wheat (used to make bread). Potatoes would be an insurance policy - even in times of bad harvest of wheat, there would be a secondary food source that would prevent famine. This was particularly important as Prussia had been at war during the 1700s. A second benefit was that with potatoes as an alternative food source, there would now be a larger supply of food. As supply increases and demand stays the same, food prices (including that of bread) would drop, which would be beneficial for the people.
So Frederick started a propaganda campaign to encourage Prussians to grow and eat potatoes. One of his most famous campaign slogans was "Potatoes instead of truffles!" Ah... if he only lived 250 years later, he would have realised that "Potatoes with truffles" would have worked better.
As it turns out, the Prussians were not sold. They thought that the potato looked pretty unappetising - french fries hadn't invented yet. And the Prussians were not a people who readily embraced change, not least with their diet. There was the saying that developed: "was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht" or "what the peasant is not sure of, he will not eat." The town of Kolberg went so far as to issue an official reply to the King. “The things [potatoes] have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?“
But Frederick was not a man that was easily defeated. He realised that he could persuade people to eat potatoes if he simply re-branded the vegetable. Frederick was quite the talented marketer.
He ordered potato fields to be cultivated near his palace in Berlin. And then he ordered some of his best officers to rigorously guard these fields. Now the Prussian might not know what the potato was and hence would not try it. But they certainly knew that if something was so heavily guarded, it must be valuable and worth stealing.
As it turned out that was exactly Frederick's plan. In actual fact, he had his officers to appear like they were guarding the potatoes, but to be deliberately distracted or unobservant so that the people could get away with stealing them.
You can guess what happened next. People stole the potatoes and grew them. And Frederick's potato example shows us a few things: - persuasion is better than compulsion. As King, he could have forcibly introduced the potato. Instead, he found a way to make the people want it.
- all value is perceived value. Try this in a thought experiment. Think of the best expensive cars in the world - a Rolls Royce, a Maserati. What if every country agreed to only transport people sentenced to life in prison or to capital punishment in a Rolls Royce - would it still be as valuable as it is today? Nothing has changed - the car is the same, but how we think about it makes all the difference.* - to persuade people, you don't convince them with facts and evidence. We went through this in the pages on confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. We'd be much more successful in convincing people by changing their perceived value of that something.
*There is also an unverified story of Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey. The legend goes that in a bid to modernise the country, he wanted people to wearing veils. But by simply ordering this, people would be unhappy and there would be resistance. What did Ataturk do? Apparently, he made it compulsory for all prostitutes to wear veils when they were working.
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