Monday, July 21, 2014

Potato Salad Math

The other day I discovered the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in a very long time. This guy Zack 'Danger' Brown on kickstarter has raised $61,186 (as of 8:00 PM on 21/07/14) to make potato salad (Link). I have no clue what he's going to do with all the money - hopefully some will go to charity as he proposed in an interview. However, it got me thinking. How much potato salad could you make with that amount of money? Naturally I had to put my grade 11 university math skills to the test.

First, I found a good potato salad recipe. I picked this one, since it calls itself the world's best, and has a ton of good reviews backing up that claim. Then I did some research and tried to figure out the price of making said recipe. Here's how it seemed to break down:

6 potatoes - $2
1 small onion - $0.17
1 cup of celery - $0.33
1 tsp salt - $0.0026
8 eggs - $1.33
1/2 cup sugar - $0.23
1 tsp cornstartch - $0.02
1/2 cup vinegar - $0.07
1 can evaporated milk - $1
1/4 cup butter - $0.3
1 cup mayonnaise - $1.50
1 tsp mustard - $0.2 (if you use the really good stuff)

That totals up to about $7.15. One recipe of this stuff serves 6 people, assuming each person eats about one potato's worth.

$61,186/$7.15= 8557.5 recipes of potato salad.
8557.5 x 6 servings =  51,344.9 servings.

So in theory this guy has enough money to feed 51,345 people. That's 20,000 more people than the entire population of Nunavut. You could feed every resident of Monaco. Madness.

So yeah this is how I'm spending my time lately. Summer is great.

Hope you're all being as productive as I am,

E

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