Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Happy National Potato Chip Day!!!

I bet you've been waiting for this all year, and today's the big day, so let's get ready to party! Today is you're favorite holiday and mine: National Potato Chip Day!!!

Ok, just kidding, I didn't realize it was a holiday either. Seems like it was probably made up by the snack food industry. But still... besides being very tasty potato chips have a rich and interesting history, and do really deserve their own day. At least more than any other snack food. I mean really, national pretzel day?! that would be totally ridiculous!

These days if I eat chips I like the Lays Mesquite BBQ best. After that I'd probably go for Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream. Although in the past I used to really like Ruffles Sour Cream and Bacon (sadly absent from the stores in San Fran), and All Dressed (which I don't think they even make in the states). Back when I was a kid, I used to love the Hostess company the best. Back in the day, the Canadian arm of Hostess was pretty aggressive in the chip market (I believe) as a response to competitors like the ever original Humpty Dumpty. So that said, I don't know if it was the stores I went to, or that they used my area of Toronto as a test market but they had some pretty weird and wonderful flavors over the years. I wish I'd kept the packages just to prove to people that I've actually tasted some of these oddball flavors: cucumber, fries and gravy, cheeseburger, pepperoni pizza, baked potato, probably 10 different kinds of BBQ chicken... just great stuff. Sure, some of them tasted god awful, but as a kid I really loved the excitement of finding a new flavor of chip. Of course, most of them didn't last, and some I only ever saw the one time I bought them, but what a great experience. And every now and then one of the freak flavors like All Dressed would somehow make it into mainstream. If you've got the munchies nothing else will do.

My most missed Canadian chip flavors here should be obvious to any canuck south of the border: Ketchup, and Dill Pickle...

These days it seems like the chip companies are a bit more reserved. Especially in the States. Oh sure we've got The Works now (baked potato with sour cream, chives, bacon), and San Francisco is enough of an international city that I've seen things like White Cheddar, and Curry flavored Pringles; but generally I feel like the age of crazy experimentation is gone. That's too bad if you ask me.

Anyhow, have a great National Chip Day, and why not let me know in the comments section what your favorite flavor of chip is....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You don't have Ketchup and Dill Pickle south of the border? That's just plain strange. Ketchup and potato chips are .... are like .... freedom fries and Heinz aren't they?

Strange that we up here would be so blessed with a cornucopia of potato chip flavours. Generally, we're the ones who get the bum's end of it all...something about our market not being large enough to warrant such a large fragmentation in product styles.

Ah well, and here we don't even celebrate Potato(e) Chip Day. Too bad.

Anonymous said...

p.s. I found out from my girlfriend this morning that yesterday (National Potato Chip Day) was also Steak and Sex day. She didn't tell me yesterday of course....oh no....anyway... if you guys want to celebrate Chip Day go ahead... next year I'll enjoy my porterhouse and sex.

Geoff said...

Of course it was also Pi Day, So we should've been celebrating all things 3.14 related too...

Maybe next year eat a good steak and chips dinner, followed by sex, and then drift off to sleep while contemplating the intricacies of complex mathematics.