i. The Abyss of BBQ
In the world of chips, there is a phenomenon known (exclusively to myself, until now) as the “Abyss of BBQ.” The phrase “Black Hole of BBQ” might do just as well, but I have always been a fan of abysses (invoking them, staring into/being stared back at by them, tossing my hopes, dreams, and expectations into them, etc.). The Abyss of BBQ describes the tendency of many exploratory and unconventional potato-chip flavours to end up tasting like a variation of a generic BBQ chip or, at best/worst, like BBQ bordering on All-Dressed. Which, I suppose, given that All-Dressed by definition contains BBQ, would just be “Half-Dressed.” In recent years, the second (or third) wave of the novelty-chip renaissance has started to, as it were, “chip away” at the phenomenon, but the Abyss nevertheless exercises its attraction.
Travelling outside of North America exposes one not only to a plethora of new chip flavours, but to a different set of culinary reference points around which the local canon of flavours constellate. The most jarring of which, particularly where the Abyss of BBQ is concerned, is the fact that BBQ is not a tried-and-true point of reference for potato-chip flavour design (or consumer familiarity) the other side of the Atlantic. This is a reminder of how distinctly American is BBQ/barbecue (or, to be really accurate, African, then African American, then Ugly American), both the chips and the culinary technique/culture to which they so tenuously and non-specifically refer.
Arguably, BBQ flavour in North America refers to nothing (for the sake of clarity, I’ll take “BBQ” to indicate the chip flavour, and “barbecue” the culinary practice, although we’ll see how long it takes for that neat distinction to collapse). It points to no specific meat, to no specific seasoning, thus belying the considerable diversity that exists in American barbecue (to say nothing of commercially available barbecue sauces that present a simulacral register unto themselves). It points only to the chip itself, or the idea thereof, such that any chip flavour that invokes a particular barbecued food item, such as ribs or, say, baby back ribs (the imaginative capacity of chip-flavour scientist-administrators for what items can be barbecued is strikingly lean, it seems), is inevitably understood as a variation on the pre-existing ur-flavour of non-specific BBQ. Which, perhaps to its credit, is not even itself a single uniform flavour, since every brand’s take on BBQ falls somewhere or other along a spectrum of sweetness versus smokiness (ultimately tasting like Mrs. Dash, with more or less smoked paprika involved). It is thus extra-specially conceptually interesting to encounter BBQ chips in Europe or the UK, because one can’t help but wonder whether their reference point is the American BBQ chip or some notion of American barbecue as a culinary entity proper. Put another way: is the European BBQ chip a barbecued-meat-flavoured chip or a (American) BBQ-chip-flavoured chip? It is not always clear.
To take the case of the British version of Smoky BBQ Kettle Chips, one gets the sense that there is perhaps a “real thing” that the Kettle UK creative team is attempting to approximate, but it is as if they assume that the American BBQ chip is itself an approximation of some truly existing object called BBQ (rather than the self-contained simulacrum I am suggesting they represent) and they in turn are trying to get closer to that Real. In effect, the UK chip tastes like a more carefully refined version of a BBQ chip. But what could I possibly even mean by that? It’s just less gross, less vulgar, than the typical American BBQ chip? It tastes like more real things (like, plants and shit) went into making this chip that is supposed to taste like what? A condiment? A process? Like fat and fire and the transformation of time into the relaxation of flesh?
My friend James has suggested that the appearance of the BBQ chip in the UK is an indication of the extent to which the usual British resistance to American cultural influence is being dissolved by the recent trend in burger and “American barbecue” joints popping up around London (see also: the proliferation of beers that don’t taste like malty dishwater, for better or worse). I am inclined, though, to speculate that the American BBQ boom is more the result of forward-thinking entrepreneurs realizing the opportunity presented by all these Britishers eating BBQ chips and being like, “By Jove, these are good, but…barbecued what?” And so I am left wondering, to what does the UK Kettle BBQ chip refer? Some local interpretation of the “American Grill” or to yet some other chip referring to a chip, in a chain of imitation extending toward an ever-receding horizon, over which peeks a suburban dad in a suspiciously pristine apron that reads “In Dog Beers, I’ve Only Had One”?
ii. On the Science-Fiction Turn in Chips
Perhaps I give potato-chip scientists too much credit. I think I have a tendency to imagine them as a league of poor man’s Ferran Adrià, dog-eared copies of Philip K. Dick novels in the pockets of their lab coats, eager to probe the limits of representation, memory, and experience at the intersection of sensation and technology. For chips have become a bit of a technology of the fantastic. For all that cultured meat and genetic engineering have a holy shit it’s the fuckin’ future quality about them, potato chips evoke more of the actual imaginary of science-fiction past, by which I mean space-food pills, those condensed meal-in-a-pills perhaps best remembered from The Jetsons, but with a lineage extending as far back as the late nineteenth century. One could argue that diet shakes and nutritional supplements are likelier candidates for the realization of this vision, but I think that the space-food pill is about more than sustenance and nutrition abstracted from the material particularities of food, because one is always given to believe the pill reproduces something of the specificity of the food it is supposed to represent. The space-food pill may also be thought of as a fantasy of harnessing the imaginary of food, or at least one that poses the question “Is there something that eludes us still in the experience and the enjoyment of food, even when we have produced a technology that not only mimics the taste, but generates the impression of having eaten the thing?” David Cronenberg would answer yes: it is the “Poetry of the Steak,” or, that which allows us to be made crazy by the flesh.1
Of course, chips fall well short of this. They are a comparatively primitive technology, hewing all to one side of the sensory/sustenance divide, and even then to flavour over feel. Over the past decade, however, we have witnessed something that could be called by way of shorthand “the science-fiction turn in chips.” For a long time, North American chips were dominated by condiment flavours, many that already had a place relative to potatoes in their various preparations (e.g., ketchup, salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion). There are, of course, exceptions, and many would remember the brief explosions of precocious creativity that brought us pizza, hot dog, roast turkey and stuffing, and, uh, boloney chips, but for the most part the roster remained somewhat stable, if not conservative (excepting the notorious Hostess fruit flavours debacle of the late 1970s). In recent years, however, the market has been deluged with new flavours, such that it seems an impracticable as well as worthless undertaking to stay abreast of them, let alone offer any critical commentary. What is noteworthy about this phenomenon is that on the whole there has been a move toward the representation of more complex foods, entire meals even, and this, I argue, brings the chip more in line with the spirit of the space-food pill. Although not actually a potato chip, the Doritos Late Night All-Nighter Cheeseburger flavour was the first chip that for me imparted a sense of the uncanny, and while this effect has been by no means uniformly achieved in the waves of subsequent experiments, the anticipation of its possibility has at least been routinized. The idea that a chip could be eerily reminiscent of the thing that it supposes to imitate, even when that thing is a salad or a sandwich of some complexity, has been elevated from the utterly implausible to the merely improbable in a strikingly short time.
I like to think of those flavour scientists toiling away, impelled at least as much by their desire to advance the practice of their art as by the caprices of cool-hunting marketing executives. Perhaps a rung or two lower on the visionary ladder than the Wendell Stanleys and Frank Macfarlane Burnets who pursued the question of whether or not viruses were alive to the logical extent of destabilizing our very understanding of “life” itself, but scientific adventurers nevertheless. If they are mere technicians, then they are technicians of human experience.
And so, when I encountered the new Old Dutch Bacon Cheeseburger Slider chips, my initial reaction was to be infuriated—was Old Dutch seriously presuming to claim that their chip tasted not simply like a bacon cheeseburger, but like a miniature bacon cheeseburger? What hubris, I fairly spat. Such airs! Upon further reflection, however, I came to appreciate the possibility that this was more than base pandering to the popularity (already waning, I should think) of the slider, that there was something of an intentional provocation about it. I found myself charmed by the idea that such a fine distinction was not in fact meaningless, for it prompts one to say, “Okay, of course not. But what if?” What if there was a way to capture the nuances of space and scale on the plane of a chip? What if more than taste could be conveyed in a flavour? What if you could make something taste small?
Unfortunately, the chips in reality are basically horrible. Over seasoned, under theorized, vulgar and shitty, as with the rest of the Double Dutch “Appetizers” line (Burstin’ Onion, Buffalo Wings and Blue Cheese, Calamari and Tzatziki). What inspired puckishness I inferred is likely totally misplaced, although I do appreciate the ambitiousness of deciding that “fermented milk, garlic, and mollusks” or “county fair whole deep-fried onion” were flavours within the scope of the practically attainable. Ironically, the line’s greatest failure is not in the domain of taste, but in everything else about the chips: thick-cut, wide-wale rippled chips, the seasoning powder caked on, cloyingly dense, somehow achieving simultaneously the impression of dehydration and dampness. It makes a wretched offering. I’ve always been a fan of plain, myself.
1 See “The Sixth Quarter.”