The latest food scare is the worst yet: we're running out of it. Staggering rises in the prices of wheat, rice and animal feeds have sparked food riots from Egypt to Haiti and brought dire warnings of approaching famine from the UN.

Even in Britain the price of some basic foods is up by 15 per cent on a year ago. We're looking at the launch of the most compelling diet yet. But for those who want to eat, there is hope. It comes in a potato shape, perhaps crinkle-cut.

The potato - and let's not call it humble ever again - could save us all, according to the International Potato Centre in Peru, where Incas first mashed the tuber and called it food. Fast-growing, hugely productive, potato plants require little water and you can grow them in a window-box - well, more easily than you can wheat (try getting a combine harvester through the window).

Hurrah for potatoes. You can stuff them into your children (until the world runs out of frying oil). The potato blight that killed seven million in the 19th century is sorted out now, thanks to genetic modification.

And it's not true, as was widely believed at the time, that potatoes make you stupid. Nor is it true that eating too many makes you look like a potato - though it's intriguing that people eat more potatoes in Belarus than anywhere else on the planet.

How to Cheat at Potatoes and Jamie's Spuds will not be published until a bit later in this scare, but you can start today. The great French cookery bible, Larousse Gastronomique, lists more than 100 recipes for totties.

Larousse's pommes de terre a l'anglaise goes: “Peel the potatoes to a uniform size and boil them in salted water.” Thrillingly simple, though why peel them? And you can always drink the water afterwards.

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