Yeah yeah yeah

this photo just keeps getting better the longer you look at it pic.twitter.com/Fff15285i1

— Kat Angus (@katangus) November 21, 2017

Continue reading Fail Chips →

Lay’s is inviting us, the unwashed public, to determine the new flavor for Lay’s Potato Chips. You can join in on the email harvesting/fun at https://www.dousaflavor.com/

I can’t find my flavor I went with a Cinnamon Sugar Teriyaki flavor because I think that sauce tastes good on Baked Lay’s but no doubt some garlic wasabi flavor will win and nobody will eat those chips. It is also somewhat antithetical to my whole no flavor added chips because when it’s all over, flavored chips are just chemical dust added to subpar chips. Good chips don’t need flavor enhancers and in most cases the flavor added to  the chip is just some capitalist’s idea of what the flavor should be based on how little they can spend to achieve the desired effect. But seriously give Lay’s a chance. The prize is a million dollars and there’s a finite number of flavor combos so you might win. Even though you almost certainly will not.

There’s a lot of talk about normalization these days. You know, once the media reports horrors with a ho hum attitude, people take a ho hum attitude towards horrors and thus it becomes normalized. 15 years ago if you’d seen a guy holding a touchscreen computer on the train you’d have assumed he was a high tech terrorist assassin with the means to destroy the train you’re on by jiggling his techno slab. Today literally every last person on the train has one of these devices and yes, potentially, every last one of them could have the ability to take out the entire train by tapping a few keys, it’s unlikely, but it could happen. There’s a lot of talk about normalization these days. I hope it doesn’t become normal to attack women, people of color, trans people, religious people. If it does, my god the worst thing that could happen would be for us to say, yeah that’s what happens. Kinda like a lot of people have been saying for years when unarmed black men were being gunned down by the police. It’s hard to think of jokes or even derive enjoyment from something as silly as potato chips when you see a dark cloud forming. I sure hope it’s a storm that passes, reminding everyone of its potential power and fury. But I fear that it will consume us, even those we assume would never give in to the dark forces of fascism. Please stay safe and be sure to show love and respect to those who might be experiencing everything from a more ominous perspective than your own. Peace.

Welcome to Chip on Chips, my name is Chip and this is my foodie blog where I review potato chips. I’ve got these four reviews all queued up and ready for your approval.

• The review that started it all
• Kettle Chips
• Lowfat Chips
• The latest

If you like what you’re reading you can hit me up on Twitter @kliksf with any suggestions you might have or you can hurl abuse at me in person if you’re not on Twitter. Thanks for being you and enjoy your stay here.

Robot Kiosks Aren’t People!

Okay let’s get right to the point, I don’t have time to do a whole review of kettle chips or bomb-ass french fry spots in the city because there’s something that needs addressing. It’s happening right now people, go to McDonald’s here in beautiful San Francisco, and you might see the automated ordering kiosks, where you can fumble through your order on a giant touchscreen in front of half a dozen people who are all hungry for McDonald’s. You finally place your order, you wait and it’s like you’re in a Starbucks all of a sudden, your number, which you chose, which is separate from your order number, is called and a smiling McDonald’s employee puts your order on the counter and you go get it. You choose your soda like you’ve been doing at the movies since the first Dark Knight came out, from a kiosk where now you can get strawberry vanilla ginger ale.

It all has the feel of the future you know, like kids under the age of 6 will look back at old pictures of McDonald’s when they’re older and go, wow, look at those cavemen, having the guy behind the counter draw from one of four soda choices and diet versions. Where are the big screen kiosks, the social media tie-ins, the facial recognition, pre-loaded ordering and anti-Trump graffiti?

But the important thing to notice in this whole manifest destiny of technology that brings us to tapping on a screen so we can pay for fast food is how fake the whole thing is. The real motive behind this is to make it less necessary to pay people to do a job a robot could do. Okay sure, you get to choose more sodas but you can’t order your fries crispy or anything. I mean the McDonald’s that have these new systems are trying to look like they’re better than McDonald’s, when they are always McDonald’s but they want to make the upgrade look like something it’s not. It’s not some heightened form of service where you get to choose what you want, they subtly make it harder to do things. You could probably ask to get a 4 piece McNugget meal from the clerk, or at least order the McNuggets, the fries and the drink from him or her. Try bargaining with the motherless kiosk in front of you with the line increasing behind you.

Maybe I’m too old and jaded to embrace the new technology. Instead of seeing the bigger picture perhaps I’m just exposing my own bitterness. After all, I do seem to care a lot about what happens at McDonald’s. But I know that McDonald’s is a cultural icon not unlike Starbucks and I wonder if I’ll be reading blogs from caffeine junkies in a few years talking about how much they love/hate the new ordering at Starbucks with the screen and the robotic syrup dispenser that either made the pumpkin spice latte perfect or ruined it. The service industry will be nothing more than refilling trays and bags with raw ingredients. That and repairing robots I guess.

I don’t imagine there’s a great improvement in the rest of the food at McDonald’s I can only speak to the fries and sometimes their apple pies. The fries have not improved with this change. Perhaps it’s just the letdown after dialing in my order on the big shiny screen and then picking up slightly undercooked fries and no idea where the pepper is. Everybody was at least as confused as I so it wasn’t so bad. But the french fries, man, I thought I missed them while they were renovating my spot. Now I’m wondering if it’s worth it anymore.

Check out what the awful people over at Business Insider have to say about McDonald’s kiosks.

Brace yourselves, haters. I just got my shipment of Soylent. That’s right, I’ve stepped over to the darkside of elitist tech bros in the hopes of never having to eat food again. Soylent, if you haven’t heard, is a powder put out by a company that straight up took its name from the shlocky 70s sci fi classic Soylent Green. There’s two ways this whole thing can go down, either Soylent is a tolerable-tasting, super healthy way to replace meals and still get balanced nutrition or I’ve just paid good money to get trolled by nextwave tech jerks. Soylent straight up claims that you can give up food completely and live entirely on their powder. Their demographic is people who consider the whole “food thing” to be too much of a hassle. People who are looking to ditch the drudgery of shopping, preparing, eating and cleaning up and replacing all that with some powder that comes in bags. Unlike meth, however Soylent will keep you from wasting away while becoming increasingly irritable if they are to be believed.

That Soylent is trying to be the Apple computers in the PC world of protein powders is hilarious. It’s not like powders like Soylent don’t already exist for bodybuilding or fat shaming. So instead of selling its product in the same neighborhood as a bodybuilding shop or muscle man gym as supplements, these guys are up online with a flashy website with the words, “[w]hat if you never had to worry about food again?” It’s like a miracle cure, holy shit I never have to worry about food again just buy Soylent forever that doesn’t sound like a Faustian bargain at all how do I get in on this?

Soylent is positioning itself as a tech company, and apparently guys grinding 80 hour weeks playing foosball are the ones who need Soylent to carry on. This powder is said to be engineered for optimal nutrition which is believable if you’re a white male. Upon opening my shipment I noticed that I got version 1.4*. Version 1.3 had some sort of oil in a separate container that you mixed with the powder but version 1.4 has the oil somehow baked in. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to be that guy in the breakroom mixing his oil with the powder like a caveman in the 1.4 epoch? You’ll laugh at him until you find out 1.5 came out because 1.4 causes rickets and needle-eye syndrome or some shit so now you’re up late at night refreshing the page on the Soylent website to make sure your tech food is up to date, you’re on forums with people checking the official CHANGELOG and discussing the effects this substance is having on your lives. This is the hassle-free lifestyle you can look forward to when you ditch food for Soylent.

So basically you take a scoop they provide and pull out one scoop of the powder and mix that with at least two scoops of water. They have a couple simple recipes for if you want to dump some berries or yogurt into it but you know me I’m pretty vanilla, in pretty much everything, so I want my techbro powdery suspension drink plain. A quick taste of the powder before you mix it in with the water and you get hints of cereal box dust, Rainbow Co-Op Grocery bulk foods aisle, and prison pancake batter. Then you drink some. And it’s pretty much a wet version of that. It’s an acceptable taste and if it is truly able to deliver on its absurd promise that you can healthily subsist entirely on their product then more power to them. For me, I don’t think I’m going to try to live like that. I will recommend Soylent for one simple and very important reason, your earthquake kit. I didn’t much enjoy Soylent so now I have 6 days worth of it to get by on. Ultimately Soylent is just a gimmicky protein powder/meal substitute you can make in a pinch. That’s why most people keep Luna bars around though so you may not even want it for that.

As much as I feel like you should make fun of the whole techbro scene that Soylent seems to be part of I wouldn’t immediately start clowning on somebody if I saw him or her mixing up or drinking a batch of Soylent in the breakroom. For some people food can be an awful minefield of allergic reactions or weird intolerances like dairy or flavor or maybe they want to keep their food supply cruelty-free in which case Soylent makes perfect sense. However if that person started acting like I’m the idiot for eating a honeycrisp apple or a bag of chips because I’m not cool enough to ditch food for Soylent, well I guess I wouldn’t clown him, but I would overtly pity the guy for buying into the utopian myth Soylent seems to be peddling.

http://soylent.me
Check out The Atlantic article about the inventor of Soylent
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-who-would-make-eating-obsolete/361058/
*Post originally written in March, 2015

I am not a fan of flavored chips.

I'll just eat some of these corn soup flavored potato chips while I think. pic.twitter.com/CsAe9xU5bz

— Colin Peters (@ColinPeters) May 5, 2016

I know many of you are and as such my chip reviews may seem to be lacking. Dips make sense, but that you put the flavor on the chip and have it in the bag for all that time is gross. Most times the ingredients list weird chemicals and stabilizers that serve only to mimic the flavor you’re trying to get. It’s also an opportunity for shady chip manufacturers to let you down with promises of flavor they don’t deliver. If Lay’s or Kettle launched a line of chips made from different types of potatoes with their own flavor profiles they’d blow up Wall Street. If you could choose between kettle style russet chips or red potato crinkle cut or avocado oil sweet potato man. That would be amazing. Instead it’s Maple Bacon flavored chips everybody knows doesn’t taste like maple or bacon or even potato chips.