Dear Mr. Evanston:

Sweet potatoes didn’t chase your relatives from Ireland. If sweet potatoes were grown there, your relatives would still be in Ireland, and they’d be strong and happy.

Sweet potatoes are barely related to the starchy, bland, blight-susceptible, nutrition-challenged tubers that crushed the hopes and dreams of an entire culture. Sweet potatoes are way too funky for that. They’re a completely different and far superior root vegetable — it’s really a sin to mention them in the same breath as the pasty white substance so popular with pasty white people.

You clearly need some educating about the joyous, wonderous, super-nutritious, soul-fixin’ sweet potato. Those of us who spent time in the South know of its wonders. It is a gift from the gods, not a curse associated with its hope-crushing distant relative. It is orange-colored manna from above. Anything a potato can do, it can do better — and it makes an honest and wonderous pie, instead of the pure faux-ness of alleged ‘pumpkin’ pie, which is really “condensed canned pumpkin-colored custard-like semi-gelatinous pie.”

So: When it comes to sweet potatoes, if you’re gonna keep yakkin’ in the back seat, I must insist you push over and move your big feet. Come back when you’ve eaten your vegetables.