About > Janey Duntley
Janey Duntley
{Art Director}
I consider it miraculous that I can look at potatoes and astonishing that I can eat them. Starting around age 5, my relationship to these odd, tuberous growths has become far from ordinary.
Some mothers go to the market to purchase real potatoes, not potato flakes, for their families. They bring them home, give them a good scrub down, peel them to their starchy, white center and whip up a bowl of savory, homemade mashed potatoes.
On the other hand, my mother used potatoes as torture devices. Many times she would buy a bag at the grocery store, toss the bag beneath the sink and forget about them for a few months. Once she realized she had forgotten to cook them and admired how the potatoes had festered, sprouting tentacle-like appendages from the potatoes’ eyes.
She’d beckon for my brother and I to assist her in the kitchen. Being the faithful children that we were, we ran excitedly to help her out. BAH! She’d jump in front of us, shoving the overgrown potatoes in our faces. Our joy turned to sheer terror as my mother proceeded to chase us around the house with the ‘alien’ potatoes, as she called them.
Once we calmed down and realized that aliens weren’t taking over earth in the form of potatoes, mom would offer us a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, but I was usually too skeptical to actually eat them.