The story of how french fries got to be ridiculously expensive starts really small, before making you scratch your head about the way the whole world works.

The short version is that there’s possibly an algorithm-driven conspiracy in which a literal potato cartel has been colluding to raise the price of all of our french fries.

The long version goes like this: Plaintiffs have alleged in a set of lawsuits that the largest potato product manufacturers in the country — the four that have cornered nearly the entire frozen potato market — all put their sensitive market data into the same third-party software, which uses that........

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