by April Fulton, The Salt at NPR Food (7/8/14)
Within days of asking for a total of $10 to crowdsource his first potato salad, Ohioan Zack Danger Brown raised tens of thousands of dollars. He promised people he would read their names aloud as he made this salad, which was apparently an irresistible draw.
Being the geeks we are, we asked our NPR Science Desk interns Nicholas St. Fleur and Kara Manke to do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation.
With the nearly $60,000 pledged so far, Brown could make 153,846 servings of this basic Hellmann's Original Potato Salad recipe featuring potatoes, mayo, some vinegar, salt and onion.
That's a lot of potato salad, and it's clever and all, but aren't there some other, potentially more worthy food projects on Kickstarter that could use a little of the cash so freely spent on Brown's project?