How the Potato Was Named

Ten little toes with smiley faces—each one a member of the Potay family, ready to tell an old bedtime story about curiosity, resilience, and how the potato got its name.

This story is loosely based on one my dad used to tell my sister and me when we were little—usually at bedtime, usually with our toes lined up like characters waiting their turn.

It was his playful twist on the old children’s rhyme about piggies going to market. In his version, our toes belonged to a Polish farm family called the Potays, each with a job, a personality, and a fate for the night. The details shifted depending on his mood, our questions, and how wiggly our feet were, but the heart of it never changed: ordinary people, hard times, and a small, curious someone who made a mess and saved the day.

What follows is my remembering of that story—expanded, embroidered, and rooted a little deeper in the soil—but still carrying the same warmth, humor, and quiet hope he planted all those years ago.

How the Potato Got Its Name

Long ago—long before potatoes were tidy things stacked in bins at the store—there lived a family called the Potays.

They were a Polish family with a very small farm and a very big problem.

Papa Potay rose before the sun each morning and worked the fields, turning soil that grew thinner and more tired with every season. Mama Potay kept the hearth going and stretched whatever food they had into soups and stews that fed both body and hope. Big Brother Potay minded the cow, brushing her ribs and whispering encouragement as the milk slowed to a trickle. Sister Potay cared for the chickens, counting eggs like treasures and shooing foxes from the fence line.

And then there was Baby Potay.

Baby Potay had no proper job, which worried everyone. She asked too many questions. She wandered where she shouldn’t. She poked sticks into holes, dug where the soil looked different, and came home with dirt under her nails and trouble on her heels.

When the famine came, it came quietly at first.

The rains stopped visiting. The grain refused to rise. The cow’s ribs showed. The chickens laid less and less until some days they laid nothing at all. Papa Potay worked longer hours, Mama Potay scraped pots cleaner, and still the cupboards echoed.

Then came the disaster no one expected.

One afternoon the sky darkened—not with clouds, but with wings. Grasshoppers descended in a clicking, whispering storm, chewing through what little green remained. They ate the tops of plants, the leaves, the last visible promise of food.

Papa Potay stood in the field with his hat in his hands.

Mama Potay closed her eyes at the hearth.

Big Brother Potay kicked at the dirt.

Sister Potay gathered the chickens close.

And Baby Potay?

Baby Potay followed the grasshoppers.

She noticed where they didn’t linger. She noticed patches of ground where the plants had looked sickly before—twisted, yellowed, unimpressive. She knelt. She poked. She dug.

“Stop making a mess!” Sister Potay called.

But Baby Potay kept digging.

Her fingers struck something firm. Then another. And another.

She pulled them free—lumpy, knotted things, pale and dirt-streaked, shaped like crooked little toes curling out of the earth.

She ran to the house, arms full, laughing.

“I found food hiding!” she cried.

Papa Potay stared. Mama Potay frowned. Big Brother Potay sniffed. Sister Potay wrinkled her nose.

But Mama Potay washed them, sliced them, and dropped them into the pot.

That night, the Potays ate until their bellies were warm for the first time in months.

The strange toe-things kept coming. Wherever Baby Potay dug, more appeared. They hadn’t minded poor soil. They hadn't been bothered by grasshoppers. They had waited quietly underground, patient and stubborn.

The family survived the famine. Then the winter. Then the years that followed.

And when neighbors asked what had saved them, Papa Potay would smile and say,

“Our Baby Potay found food where no one thought to look.”

And so, the story goes, the potato took its name—from Potay, from toes, from a curious child who dug one more time when everything looked lost.

The Moral

When things are bad, don’t give up.

You never know what a little curiosity, a little mess, and one more turn of the soil might reveal. 🥔✨

Growing with you,

Cindy