The internet is full of fabulous facts about everything from current events to the history basket weaving and french fry fun facts. As we research for our daily content on food trucks, food carts and street food, we stumble upon some items of knowledge that we just did not know.

We have decided when these fun facts pop up, that we would share them with our readers in our section titled “Did You Know?”

For today’s Did You Know we will look at French Fry fun facts.

French Fry Fun Facts: French fries (American English, with “French” often capitalized), or chips, fries, or French-fried potatoes are batons of deep-fried potato.

North Americans refer to any elongated pieces of fried potatoes as fries, while in the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, long, thinly cut slices of fried potatoes are often called fries to distinguish them from the more thickly cut strips called chips.

French fries are known as frites, patates frites or pommes frites in French, a name which is also used in many non-French-speaking areas, and have names that mean “fried potatoes” or “French potatoes” in others.

  • Between the 1850s and 1930s, French fries were known more illustratively as “French fried potatoes” in America.  Around the 1930s, everybody dropped the “potatoes” on the end and just called them French fries.
  • Leaving the potato skin on French fries actually leaves in important vitamins that are lost if the skins are peeled away.
  • The first occurrence of French fries in America may have been at a diplomatic dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson.
  • Steak fries, or chips, actually tend to have lower fat content than normal French fries, due to the lower surface to volume ratio.
  • The slang term for potato, “spud”, comes from the spade-like tool that is used to harvest the potatoes.
  • Americans eat more than 16 pounds of French fries every year, which comes to over 2 million tons!
  • McDonald’s uses about 7% of the potatoes grown in the United States for its French fries. They sell more than 1/3 of all the French fries sold in restaurants in the U.S. each year.
  • To burn off the calories in a medium order of McDonald’s French fries, you would need to do: 58 minutes of cycling, 90 minutes of bowling or 47 minutes of high impact aerobics.

Key Dates

  • July 13th is National French Fries Day.
  • August 12th is National Julienne Fry Day.

Learn how to make the perfect fry <here>

French Fry fun facts we missed?

Let us know if we missed any french fry fun facts in the comment section or our food truck forum. We always love to add to these lists. If we can verify that the facts is just that, a fact, we will give the reader credit in the article.

Reference: Wikipedia: Fun Facts about  French Fries.

Find all of the National Food Holidays to spice up your food truck menu specials throughout the year.