Why do Russians eat potatoes without the skin?

[Don Livingston]

I wonder if there has been a shift in US attitudes towards potatoes eaten
with their skins on? To my memory, in the sixties (in Arizona) we always ate
the center of our baked potatoes, but never the skins.  In the early
seventies I remember being quite surprised when I first saw someone eat a
baked potato skin, and I also recall a college conversation in the eighties
where one of my friends insisted that one did not have to clean the potatoes
before baking them.  (Potatoes sold in standard grocery stores at the time
were already washed, so she felt one did not have to wash them again.)  I
concluded at the time that if one intended to eat the skins, one scrubbed
them again before cooking which had two effects:  1- it removed what little
dirt remained, and 2- it made the skins thinner and more tender since we
used a stiff plastic vegetable brush to scrub them.

So from my solipsistic perspective, eating potatoes skin-on was less common
in the sixties, more common in the seventies, and very common from the
eighties onward.  Perhaps people older than I can fill in the years previous
to that?

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