Surplus food storage and influence from childhood movies put BYU students in a messy situation.
On Saturday, students gathered at a local park to participate in a mashed potato fight. The fight was a success and event organizers plan on holding it again.
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Andrew Zobrist, one of the event organizers and a student from Portland, explained the inspiration behind this event.
“Every time I would come back out to Utah my family would send me home with extra bags of potato pearls and I just accumulated a ridiculous amount,” Zobrist said. “So, one day when I was moving into my apartment, my friends decided that we should put them to use by having a mashed potato fight.”
The event began as an activity with friends but grew and ended up requiring a lot more preparation Zobrist said and one of those preparations, of course, was making the potatoes.
“We woke up at 8:00 this morning and we’ve been steaming potatoes, it was a sweat shop in there,” the event organizer said. “There were like 10 pots of boiling water and we were mixing potatoes in trash cans.”
Zobrist said they made about $150 worth of potatoes for the event. They were not regular potatoes either, they were food dyed to mimic the food fight in the movie Hook.
“Since that [Hook] was an inspiration to this food fight we started to color some of the potatoes to add in some extra color.”
Once all the potatoes were cooked and colored, the crowd gathered the fight began spontaneously.
[/media-credit]Kiersten Merrill, a BYU student from Pasco, Washington, and one of the participants, explained how it felt to be covered in the potatoes.
“My hair feels like it is 500 pounds, it’s weighing me down,” Merrill said. “I just had potatoes all over me and it was basically like heaven, it was the greatest,”
Ali Steck, student from Hillsboro, Oregon, another participant in the fight, said that the fight was fun and a completely new experience.
“I think food fights are so funny, I love them because they are just spontaneous, when else are you going to do food fights,” Steck said.
David Barton, one of the event organizers and a student studying Exercise Science, said that after Saturday the fun isn’t over but they plan on holding the even again.
“Oh, it’s biannual, of course we are doing it again,” Barton said. “We already have plans to do it again, next spring, fall, it’s going to be the biggest potato event in Provo.”
