I love potatoes. I’ve always loved potatoes. You can keep your pasta and your rice and all that stuff. I eat it, of course. But as far as I’m concerned, you really can’t beat the good old spud.

Which is why a front page story headed “Spaghetti ousts the spud” published in the Watford Observer on January 30, 1976, made me, not for the first time, wonder whether the world has gone mad.

It seems that the soaring cost of potatoes (the price had trebled over the previous six months) meant schools could no longer afford to buy them and stay within their budgets.

“Some schools have stopped serving potatoes altogether,” the report states. “Others have limited them to twice a week and may soon run out.”

The report continues: “Parents have been offering to send their children to school with a potato if it can be cooked for them and some parents have even gone so far as to offer to pay more for school dinners.

“Meanwhile, the space on the dinner plates where potatoes used to go is being filled with a variety of other foods. These are dumplings, pastry, rice, varieties of pasta, spaghetti, macaroni, toast and freshly-made bread rolls.

“And this, said a spokesman for the South West Herts School Meals Service, is educational, teaching children to accept different foods, different methods of cooking, food that is the staple diet in other countries.” [Interesting to note that county spokesmen trotted out ridiculous ‘spun’ nonsense rather than admit the truth even in those days.]

Schools were allowed to pay up to £4.20 for a 56lb bag of potatoes, but contractors were charging up to £4.55 a bag, thus the price to schools was up from 3.3p a pound in June 1975 to 9.5p a pound in January 1976.

And there was more bad news for hungry  school children. Fewer chips were being cooked too because of the cost of oil. Each portion of chips, it was estimated, used a pennyworth of oil.

ONLINE TOMORROW: How a Watford schoolboy became a part of athletics history

These stories formed part of the Nostalgia column first published in the Watford Observer on January 17, 2014. The next Nostalgia column – with information on football, toads and sausages, among many other things – can be found in this week’s Watford Observer (dated January 24, 2014 and available in newsagents now, priced 90p) or read online here from 4pm on Thursday.

If you have anything to add – or would like to tell us anything you think our readers may enjoy about Watford’s history – we are always pleased to hear from you. Contact Nostalgia, by clicking here watfordnostalgia@london.newsquest.co.uk