These events took place in a time when people were unfamiliar with potatoes. In that time, there lived a minister who was kind of progressive. He tried to stimulate the people to eat potatoes and to cultivate them. He even commenced to grow potatoes on his own acre. However, the people refused to eat things they did not know, and they refused to grow them even more. Nobody fancied potatoes.

Then the minister went to his land and had a sign put there. The sign said that no one was allowed to even touch the potatoes, because they were solely for royal consumption. It was royal food. Potatoes were only to be served at the king's table. The sign also mentioned how they had to be prepared.

The minister put a policeman near the field as a guard; he had to see to it that no thieves would steal potatoes. However, the policeman just walked up and down a bit. One moment he was here, the other he was there, and he did not keep a really close watch. People like to do things that are prohibited. It so happened that every now and again, someone went to the field of potatoes and pulled some potatoes out of the ground, and slowly but surely the number of people doing this increased. First one person ate some potatoes, then another. That was exactly the intention of the minister. This is how he taught the people to eat potatoes, and everybody liked them so much that they started to grow potatoes themselves the next year.