The potato emoji 🥔 shows a whole unpeeled potato, with a brown, rough, bumpy skin. There is a few "eyes" on its skin, which is a common trait of a potato.
Along with wheat, rice, and maize, potatoes are one of the world's four major food crops and can be cooked and eaten in various ways. This emoji might be a way to express the love for potatoes and cuisine made by potatoes, like mashed potatoes, fries, potato chips, and potatoes au gratin.
It can also represent 'a hot potato', which means a controversial or difficult issue that people don't want to deal with or talk about. Some users use it to indicate couch potatoes (entered in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993) or potatoes on the couch 🛋🥔 . It means that this lazy and obese lifestyle that is lying on the sofa like a potato, watching TV and eating snacks, which is very vivid.
Due to the appearance of potato, this emoji can also be used to mock or insult someone or something for being small, boring, ugly insignificant, or unattractive.
The French term for potato is “pomme de terre”, which literally translates to “apple of [the] earth”. Many languages have calques of this, including German Erdapfel, Persian سیب زمینی, Hebrew תפוח אדמה, and Esperanto terpomo.
Potato was approved as part of Unicode 9.0 in 2016 and added to Emoji 3.0 in 2016.