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Hasbro is the latest toy company to embrace inclusivity by removing the gender from its Mr. Potato Head brand.

The announcement yesterday said the reason was so that all potato head fans “will feel welcome in the Potato Head world.”

You’d think this would be a non-controversial change since a potato doesn’t exhibit any obvious biological assignment.

But it immediately generated some nasty pushback on Twitter. I guess since Planters killed off Mr. Peanut last year, people are very protective of anthropomorphic food. So, somebody at Hasbro was told to – which was to explain that Mr. Potato Head isn’t going anywhere…

What the company is doing is simply dropping “Mister” from the package labeling for the potato head line.

But there will still be Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head, and the little baby potato heads.

So, I started searching around to figure out what’s actually changing here, and that’s when I made the shocking discovery that Mr. Potato Head no longer requires an actual potato!

This matters to me because I share a birth year with Mr. Potato Head – appropriate, I know – 1952 – when the Mr. Potato Head I’m familiar with required an actual potato. It was, in fact, the first toy to be advertised on television. A whole generation of American children had pet potatoes. It was fun, sustainable, and delicious with melted cheese and bacon.

And now I find it’s been a plastic potato since 1964!

Well, at least, unlike Mr. Peanut, he’s still alive – so that’s good – although not as alive as he could be if he were an actual potato.

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