Chinese chips

My Easter was rather a cooking marathon whose highlights were a flaming baked alaska, a simnel cake and a rhubarb meringue pie. The rhubarb crop in my garden is prolific, rather more so than the asparagus whose harvest has so far totalled two spears. McDonald's potato supplier, Simplot, has spent the last twenty years improving its potato farms in China, mainly in Inner Mongolia which is on the same latitude as Idaho. When they arrived in China in 1988, most farms used a horse and plough and Simplot persuaded them to join together to justify the investment in tractors and fertiliser machinery. Ten years ago they dealt with 1000 suppliers, now they have just 100 but these 100 produce one billion fries per year: not a bad yield.