New Zealand, Europe Brief News – Guinness World Records ruled that the world’s biggest potato is not actually a potato.
The New Zealand couple who thought they’d found the world’s largest potato have had their hopes dashed by the DNA results.
While most of us have probably never thought too hard about what constitutes a potato, a potential new Guinness World Record rested exactly on that.
Unfortunately, for the couple from near Hamilton on New Zealand’s North Island, Guinness was forced to break the bad news that the giant potato they thought they’d dug up on their small farm was, in fact, not a potato.
The tuber was first discovered in August last year by Colin Craig-Brown, who hit it with a hoe when he and his wife Donna were out gardening.
Having believed they may have found the world’s largest potato, they submitted images and paperwork to Guinness to try and get it confirmed.
But, their hopes were dashed when Guinness revealed that DNA testing has found it was actually the “tuber of a type of gourd”.
Colin Craig-Brown, who first hit the tuber with a hoe last August when gardening with his wife, Donna, said it sure looked and tasted like a potato. Mind you, he added, he’s never tasted a gourd tuber.
“What can you say?” said Craig-Brown. “We can’t say we don’t believe you, because we gave them the DNA stuff.”
After months of submitting photos and paperwork, the couple got the bad news from Guinness in an email last week.
“Dear Colin,” the email begins, going on to say “sadly the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”
The couple had named their find Doug, which they took to spelling Dug, after the way it was unearthed. The tuber became something of a local celebrity, after the couple began posting photos of it on Facebook with a hat on and even built a cart to tow it around.
An official weigh-in at a local farming store put Dug at 7.8 kilograms (17 pounds), equal to a couple of sacks of regular potatoes, or one small dog. The existing Guinness record will stand, a 2011 monster from Britain that weighed in at just under 5 kg.
Craig-Brown remains a big believer in Dug, who still sits in their freezer.
“I say ‘gidday’ to him every time I pull out some sausages. He’s a cool character,” Craig-Brown said. “Whenever the grandchildren come round, they say, ‘Can we see Dug?’”
“He is the world’s biggest not-a-potato.”
