In a Devastating Turn of Events, Doug the Giant Potato Is Actually a Gourd

Doug was on track to earn a Guinness World Record for largest potato until a DNA test revealed some startling news. Last year, a New Zealand couple, Colin and Donna Craig-Brown, were gardening when they stumbled into what resembled a massive potato. Obviously, it was quite a surprise considering the couple, who run a farm, didn’t plant potatoes. The “potato,” which they called Doug, weighed a baffling 17.4 pounds. But this big boy didn’t just look like a heap of starchy goodness, the Craig-Browns also tried a little bit of it and it certainly tasted like a raw potato. Doug was, by all reasonable indications, a potato. But here’s where things get interesting.

Relaying Doug’s discovery to The New York TimesOpens in a new tab, where we first saw this exciting news, Colin said, “I had a big hoe in my hand, and it went, ‘clonk,’” “I said to my wife, ‘What the hell’s that?’ I got a great big four-pronged garden fork and laid into it, like an over-excited Viking warrior. I thrust my foot deep into the earth, dragged this thing out, kicking and screaming. It was the size of a rubbish bin lid.”

As one does when a rather large vegetable turns up in the garden, the couple submitted it to the Guinness Book of World RecordOpens in a new tabs at the behest of friends and family astonished by Doug’s size. Their application was for the World’s Heaviest Potato title. The reigning champion belongs to a British man named Peter Glazebrook. He nabbed the title in 2011Opens in a new tab with a potato weighing 10 lb 14 oz. So suffice to say, at a whopping 17.4 lbs, Doug would blow the nearly 11 lb current victor out of the fryer.

Unfortunately, Doug is ineligible for the World Record as he is not a potato at all. But rather, a gourd. Along with the application, the Craig-Browns submitted a sample of Doug, which was analyzed by the folks over at Guinness. And the DNA confirmed Doug is actually “the tuber of a type of gourd.”

Naturally this added another mystifying layer to the potato-gourd situation. The Craig-Browns didn’t plant any potatoes, sure, but they also didn’t plant gourds either. However, Colin did have an interesting theory on the matter.

“There was a stage where I was growing these hybridized cucumbers, right where Doug appeared,” he said. “During a hybridization process, who’s to say they didn’t crossbreed it with a gourd plant to give it tremendous disease resistance or prolific flowering?”

This whole situation, while not remotely similar at all, reminds me of a children’s book my family had growing up. Jamie O’Rourke and the Big PotatoOpens in a new tab, follows the titular Irish farmer, who is extremely lazy and doesn’t want to farm. But after receiving a seed from a leprechaun, he suddenly ends up with an overwhelmingly big potato. One I’m sure would probably make it into the Guinness World Records if the O’Rourkes submitted it. (Strega NonaOpens in a new tab creator Tomie dePaola wrote this book too, and 10/10 would recommend it.)

Doug may not be a potato, after all, but he is a hero to the Craig-Browns—and honestly, to us all. As Colin told the Times, “He’s a pretty cool character, aye.”