When I was first told about this crazy potato salad Kickstarter, I was amazed and extremely shocked. Who launches a Kickstarter to fund your first potato salad? My friend had told me that the Kickstarter had raised over $6,000 for a guy named Zack Brown to make his first potato salad. A few hours and over 2,500 contributors later, this innocent Kickstarter has garnered over $30,000!
Photo from Kickstarter.com
Even with all this money, Brown’s going to have a hard time living up to his pledge promises. For contributing $3 or more, he’s promising you a bite of his potato salad. With the hundreds of people who’ve donated over $3, it looks like he’s going to be making way more than just one bowl of potato salad. Not to mention he probably has to ship this bite of potato salad. Odds are that by the time this bite arrives it’ll have gone bad.
The most ridiculous part? Brown has to thank each and every contributor by saying each person’s name while making his potato salad. That’s a lot of names. Even if I could earn thousands of dollars by making my first potato salad, I don’t think I’d be up for saying all those names and mailing out bites of potato salad. Can you even imagine how much the shipping fees will cost? For his sake, I hope most of the folks live in the US.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad/posts
For a larger contribution, Zack will be giving away pictures of him making potato salad, potato salad themed hats, t-shirts and recipe books. Oh, did I forget to mention the potato salad-themed haiku? It’ll even be written by Brown himself. At this point, I’m not sure if the contributors or Brown is more ridiculous.
Despite my amazement, this viral Kickstarter also leaves me slightly unsettled. Thousands of people pitched in money for Brown to make a potato salad, which is cool, for him, but what if that money was going towards a real cause like fighting hunger? Donate some money to UC Berkeley’s Food Pantry or if you’re in SoCal, head to a Vons and Pavillion store and pay $5 for a bag of non-perishable foods to be donated to a local food bank as part of ABC’s Feed SoCal campaign. There are thousands of organizations and drives across the country. Instead of funding a potato salad party, help fight hunger.
I sincerely hope Brown uses his new found money and fame to do something great. Maybe he’ll donate some of that potato salad to a local food bank or donate several thousand to help further cancer research. Whatever he does, I hope something good (other than the potato salad) comes out of it. Otherwise, it better be the best potato salad to ever come out of a kitchen. Ever.