PA Potato Laws

I love potato's.  Coming from an Irish family, potato's were always a part of our meals.  We has mashed, fried, baked, twice baked, Potato's O'Brien, french fries, Tater Tots and Scalloped potato's.  We had potato pancakes and potato's in almost all of the casseroles that my mother made.  I love potato's.  Growing up I became intimately close to this wonderful tuber.  I learned to peel potato's, slice potato's, mash potato's and even dice potato's.  As I grew older I learned how to make homemade french fries and those delicious potato pancakes.  In fact I still replicate my grandmothers recipe for the cakes.  I thought that I knew everything there was about potato's.  Boy, was I wrong.

This past week I learned that the ass backward state of Pennsylvania has a law in place that regulates the sizes of the packages that potato's are sold in.  Over all of these years of buying bags of potato's, it never crossed my mind that there would actually be a state regulated bag size on potato's.  It appears that in PA, stores can only sell spuds in quantities of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 and increments of 100 pounds thereafter.  Here is the actual law.

§ 4138. Potatoes.
(a) Increments of weight.--All potatoes packed for sale,
offered or exposed for sale in this Commonwealth shall be
packaged in containers of net avoirdupois weights of 3, 5, 10,
15, 20, 25, 50 and 100 pounds and multiples of 100 pounds.
Packages in units of less than three pounds shall be permitted.
(b) Exceptions.--The provisions of this section shall not
apply to:
(1) potatoes offered to the consumer at retail from
bulk stock;
(2) the sale of potatoes to processors or for export;
(3) the sale of peeled, cut or sliced potatoes, or
frozen or dehydrated potatoes, or precooked dehydrated or
dried potatoes;
(4) the sale of seed potatoes; or
(5) the sale of sweet potatoes or yams.

So if you want any other amount of packaged potato's, you are S.O.L.  You can't get 8 pounds, 12 pounds or 24 pounds.  This is something that I did not know until I heard that the Pennsylvania Legislature is debating on removing these packaging restrictions.  My first question was, "Why restrictions on packaging sizes"?  After researching this on the web for over an hour I came up with who the hell knows.  I could not find when or why it was passed.  Even Ask Jeeves did not have the answer.  What I do know is that 10 pounds of bagged potato's is usually a bit to much.  You use about all but 2 or 3 and then forget they are there.  Weeks later you open up a cupboard and the stench of rotting potato's hits you hard right in the snoot.  There is no worse of a smell than rotting spuds.  My stomach is turning just thinking about it.  My second question is why does the yam get all of the love here?  The regular potato is getting a hose job all around.  I could not figure this one out either.  Yams don't have to be bagged?  I don't like Yams anyway.

So what is the bottom line on all of this?  Well, as usual, Pennsylvania has a dumb law on the books and it probably took a century for someone to see it.  Potato farmers in PA grow over 200,000 tons of spuds every year and sales are way down due to all of this crazy low carb diet stuff.  The farmers and the potato co-ops lobbied Harrisburg and found a dunderhead to spearhead their cause.  Very soon we will see 8 pound bags at the cost of what is now a 10 pound bag.  The PA potato consumer is about to get boned.  Potato lovers, BEND OVER!