In Barnesville, Minnesota, potatoes were the focus of a celebration this weekend, as they celebrated Potato Day, according to NBC News.
The celebration included a wide array of potato dishes, as well as potato themed activities such as potato races, a wrestling ring filled with mashed potatoes and potato sculpting.
"When you think of potatoes, you usually think of Idaho, but the Red River Valley here has always been very rich in potatoes," Theresa Olson, the festival director, told NBC.
The potato festival began in 1938 when some locals decided to provide a lift for the community during the Great Depression. They came up with the idea of potatoes and began the festival with a parade, potato picking contest and serving "Potet Suppe," which is a Norwegian potato soup.
Today, the festival has events that attract almost 20,000 people a year.
There are activities for those looking for both the traditional and the unique, with potato picking, peeling and cooking contests, as well as potato-car racing and mashed-potato sculpting.
However, the most anticipated event of the festival is the mashed potato wrestling that takes place in a ring filled with 600 pounds of potato flakes, production scraps and water.
"It's quite a hoot," Olson said. "They get potatoes everywhere!"
Steve Barone, a video editor from Minneapolis, has competed in the wrestling three times, declaring himself the Mashed Potato Champion of the Universe, complete with a WWE-style belt. He even founded the Mashed Potato Wrestling Federation. The organization is no longer active but videos of the wrestling matches are still available on YouTube, where they have received over 800,000 hits.
"It's like wrestling in wet concrete, it wears you out," Barone said.
A lot of planning went into this year's festival, including laying out a parade route, sewing outfits for the activities and, of course, a lot of cooking to provide all the requisite potato dishes.
Potato Wrestling
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
