Why do Russians eat potatoes without the skin?

[Helen Halva]

I was introduced to the skins of baked potatoes as a small child by a 
friend my own age before 1950; in my grandparents' farm family we always 
ate boiled "new" potatoes with the skins on. I think they did become 
popular as appetizers, with cheese and bacon, in the 1970's or '80's.

Don Livingston wrote:
> 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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