In North America, we may not give potatoes with multiple or pronounced eyes a second look, but in Peru, many of the potato varieties in the markets there possess a lot of eyes. For the Quechua, the eyes are thought of as teeth, and they have a special significance. The idea is that teeth are needed to carve a place in the earth, not eyes, and so the more "teeth" a potato had, the better chance it would take root. As well, the number of teeth is thought to correspond to the number of potential potato offspring. In other words, the more teeth a potato had, the more abundant it would be.

Excerpt #2

After my grandmother boiled the potato perogies, she’d fry them in a pan with butter and then plop them, sizzling, onto our plates. Sour cream, the most fatty kind you could get, was heaped onto the lightly browned crescents that moments before Barbara’s nimble, mindless fingers had pressed closed, sealing in the mysteries of the earth. The taste of melted butter, browned onions and the cool sour cream like a velvet shawl thrown over the perogies, in a dance of hot and cold, my mouth sang with the secrets of potatoes.

Except #3

Most people in the West have never heard of veteran scientist Dr. Árpád Pusztai who conducted the only independent food safety trials on potatoes in 1998. But in the UK that same year, his name was splashed across the media for months in a potato scandal that changed his life forever. In August of 1998, a brief television interview was arranged for Dr. Pusztai to discuss the preliminary results of his work. What seemed like a routine bit of publicity for the Institute he worked for turned out to be a public relations disaster. That’s because in the interests of both public safety and scientific integrity, Dr. Pusztai matter-of-factly reported that, so far, his research indicated that genetically modified potatoes were unsafe to eat.
     -- The full story of Dr. Pusztai's ordeal can be 
         found in No Small Potatoes.