Where's My Fucking Crisps?

As I have observed before, America is a wonderful country, and I have no desire to move back to the UK. I was reminded of that fact again today when an obviously senile and retarded British judge sentenced a jobless alcoholic shitbag to a non-custodial "community service order" after he puched a defenseless 97 year-old war veteran in the face in a completely unprovoked attack, blinding him in one eye. I know that there are judges like that over here too, like the one who didn't send the sex criminal to prison because he was "too small and would have had a hard time there", so this country's far from perfect, but it has a lot of other things going for it.

If it was up to me to make America better I'd definitely change out a few judges and I'd introduce a "stupidity tax" on all Oprah and Ellen viewers. I'd still allow people to watch baseball, in spite of the fact that the season consists of about ten thousand seemingly identical and pointless games between teams who all finish within a few games of .500, but in any scheduling conflicts the NFL wins. Always. The one other thing I'd do right away is introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to diversity of crisps.

OK, you Americans call them "chips" but to me they're crisps, except when I'm ordering them over here (and only then because the servers won't understand what the fuck I want if I don't use their words). I can live with the change in name but what I can't abide is the mind-numbing lack of choice in my supermarket. Back in England I grew up with crisps in a wide variety of flavors. To begin with there were the classic three - ready salted, salt & vinegar and cheese & onion. Then the more exotic prawn cocktail, roasted chicken, smokey bacon, roast beef, spring onion and tomato ketchup. But that was just a start - crisps and other snacks started coming in all sorts of wonderful shapes and flavors. Bacon flavor Frazzles, Monster Munch (including the mouth-puckering pickled onion flavor), Quavers, Cheesy Wotsits and Hula Hoops. There were scampi and lemon flavor Nik Naks, two packets of which I once vomited in a police club car park in Bristol (they were that good).

Nowadays crisps have gone all metrosexual; there are varieties like lamb with Moroccan spices, Thai sweet chilli and caramelized onion & sweet balsamic vinegar. If you ordered a packet of those in the pub you'd have got your head kicked in back in the good old days. And talking of pubs, there you'd find the ugly stepsister of snacks - pork scratchings. So unpleasant, tooth breakingly hard and full of fat that they barely qualify as a food item, and yet perfect with a pint or five.

So tell me, please, why it is that when I go to my local supermarket I'm confronted in the "chip aisle" by about eighty barely distinguishable varieties of tortilla chip and approximately fuck all else? How can any civilized society eschew the rich panoply of potato snacks that now exist in favor of one dull, salted chip whose sole purpose in life is to transfer salsa to your mouth as a sort of edible spoon? There used to be salt & vinegar Lays potato chips - they were excellent, and I'd always buy a bag, but now they're gone, replaced by an extra facing of anonymous sodding tortilla chips. There are some regular salted chips as well but these are a bit like the snack equivalent of sex in the missionary position - not bad but wouldn't you fancy a bloody change every now and then?

America is a wonderful country but in the "arms race" of unhealthy snacks it's being outclassed and outgunned by smaller rivals, and no-one is speaking up. I want to see multi-packs of different flavored chips on the shelves, bright orange cheesy things, ridiculous shapes and exotic flavors. No-one should be forced to eat the same dull chips every week. Maybe this is a midwestern thing - familiarity and safety versus change and excitement - but not everyone round here thinks the world ends at the Mississippi.

If a country can get its kicks watching interminable baseball while eating pretzels, which basically have the consistency of a salted piece of wood, just think how much better things might be with some spare-rib or beef & onion flavored crisps. Anyone for pork scratchings while I'm at the bar?


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison