What’s wrong with Australian chips?

Old habits are hard to break.

I look at the sad solitary row of chips on the convenience store shelf and make some quick calculations.

The Smiths have a cheddar and onion flavor but that seems like an odd combo. The Ruffles are sour cream and onion — ooh a fave — but they have an import sticker so they’re sure to be exorbitantly expensive, and don’t get me started on the sticker stock of Cheetos. There’s Lays but they’re flat so won’t have enough crunch. Okay let’s go with The Smiths since they’ll be the cheapest.

The Smiths suck. The flavoring is almost non-existent — it tastes like plain chips with a sprinkling of seasoning. And it’s not the first time I’ve reacted this way when eating Australian brands’ chips. They are usually decidedly bland: once the chip hits your tongue the flavor goes away after a couple of seconds until you’re left wondering why they bothered to even come up with a flavor in the first place. What is up with the flavors here? if you’re telling me this is cheese and onion chips, then they very well better taste like artificial cheese and give me onion breath.

I only tried one flavor of Lays in Vietnam (beef pho), but it too was disappointingly bland and decidedly not flavorful.

I knew I should’ve gone for the American brands — it’s only in America where we really layer on the flavor and make the taste buds go wild with the perfect combination of salt, sugar, fat, and crunch. Food scientists have mastered that equation to literally make our bodies crave and be addicted to these tastes and feelings (Michael Moss’ Salt, Sugar, Fat is a fascinating, and a bit alarming, read). America is the king — no, scratch that — the overlord of warping tastebuds to no longer recognize the more subtle profiles of appropriately seasoned produce.

Good quality and sufficient length of sleep have eluded me this past week, and the lack of rest has finally caught up to me, causing me to instinctively reach for “comfort”. It’s funny how my body still associates salt, sugar, and fat with tiredness: I begin to crave the intense punch of artificial cheese (gosh the leftover cheese powder post-Cheetos is delicious) and the powerful crunch of textured foods (nothing more satisfying than the explosion of a Cheeto - or is the singular still Cheetos? - in your mouth) when I haven’t slept enough. And this association still exists despite a month and change, likely eight weeks total if you combine it all, of detox from artificial sugar and processed foods.

To be fair, I’ve built up that association (tired = reach for salt, sugar, and/or fat) over the past twelve years and only relatively recently, let’s say the past five, have I really consciously started to break apart that association — eating disorders are hard to fully “get over”, and in my case it’s fortunately morphed into infrequent episodes of disordered eating rather than remain a full blown eating disorder. And hey, before the association was tired OR stressed OR sad OR angry OR lonely OR any negative emotion = salt, sugar, and fat rotation overload. Now it’s merely tired = salt, sugar, and/or fat, with an occasionally rotation and/or overload.

In any case, I’ve learned my lesson. If I do reach for the chips, the solution isn’t to buy the chips, it’s to go straight home and go to sleep. And if the urge is overwhelming enough to still buy the chips, then at least buy the goddamn American brand.