Potato chips

Betcha can’t eat just one

Photo by Mustafa Bashari on Unsplash

At the world’s largest potato chip factory, it takes 35 minutes to make a bag of potato chips. Hmm, that’s about 20 minutes longer than it takes me to scarf down a package of my favourite Tyrell’s lightly salted crisps. Before we go any further, let’s get the terminology straight: here in North America we call them chips whereas in the UK, where chips are fries, chips are crisps. (Is your head hurting yet?) Whatever we call them, they’re addictive. It’s impossible to stop at eating just one.

With its iconic slogan “Bet you can’t eat just one”, Lay’s Potato Chips dared us to try. Since the ad’s airing in 1963, research has backed the advertising campaign with science. It all started with a bunch of cute, white lab rats. Researcher Tobias Hoch used magnetic resonance imaging to discover that when rats were fed potato chips, the reward centres of their tiny rat brains lit up, triggering a desire for more. This response to hyperpalatable foods like potato chips flies in the face of the body’s natural drive for nutrient-rich foods. Instead of hunger driven by the need for survival, this kind of eating is driven by desire, and rewarded with a dopamine hit that leads to a craving for more. This reward-driven eating behaviour is called hedonic hyperphagia, or hedonic hunger. Fast food snacks like potato chips are designed to hit a “bliss point” that fails to put on the brakes of satiety that survival-based eating uses as a way to curb overeating. In effect, we become conditioned to consume empty calories over and over again.

As if packing bliss into a bag of chips is not temptation enough, much research has gone into examining maximum crispiness. That satisfying crunch we experience when biting into a chip is a finely calibrated quality. In fact, the ideal “break point” is a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch. (You can’t make this stuff up.) According to William E. Lee, professor of chemical, biological, and materials engineering at the University of South Florida, the longer you use your teeth, the crunchier the product. Teeth and ears factored into his work as a food sensory researcher while at Proctor & Gamble. Nerves in the mouth—including those found in teeth–are crispness sensors. Ears are finely tuned to also detect noisiness, which is associated with pleasure. The noisier the chip, the better. Just try chewing a chip while wearing noise-reduction headphones: they’re party-poopers that take away all the fun of eating a bag of chips.

Adding to the fun is the chip bag itself. According to Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, a noisy packet makes the snack taste better. The rustle of the bag anticipates the sensation of biting into the chips, just as the pop of a cork signals the pleasure of sipping a glass of champagne. (See above: You can’t make this stuff up.) This was old news to Laura Scudder, an enterprising businesswoman from California who devised a chip bag in 1926 that sealed in freshness, preserving the crispness of the chips that otherwise would be scooped up and bagged from open barrels where they often went stale. Scudder’s bags were lined at the top of with wax paper that was sealed with a hot iron after the bags were filled. Stamped with a freshness date, the bags claimed to be, “The Noisiest Chips in the World”.

Now that we know why we like snacking on chips, we can blame a few characters, both innovative and nefarious, for popularizing the potato chip. In the nefarious group we find none other than gangster, Al Capone. On a trip to Saratoga Springs in New York, Capone tasted the potato chips served at Moon’s Lake House resort, the self-proclaimed home of the potato chip. Back in Chicago, Capone raved about the chips to his friend, Leonard Japp, who supplied Capone’s speakeasies with snacks. At Capone’s urging—an offer that was hard to refuse—Japp supplied potato chips to the gangster-owned speakeasies. His business took off, becoming Jay’s Foods, which, in 1927, coined the somewhat familiar slogan, “You can’t stop eating ’em.”

As popular as potato chips were, up until the 1950s they came plain and unsalted. “Insipid” was what an Irishman named Joe “Spud” Murphy called them. With such a chip on his shoulder, it’s no wonder he was bound to create the first seasoned crisp. Cheese & Onion was the first flavour his Tayto company developed. It was such a hit, Murphy followed with Salt & Vinegar. If you’ve ever wondered how they get the caramel into the Caramilk Bar, you’re probably scratching your head about how they get the vinegar into the potato chip. It’s an abracadabra trick that’s as old as, well, 1615 when housewives made dried vinegar from a starchy paste set out in the sun. Hundreds of years later, many potato chip companies use the same concept by spraying vinegar onto starchy maltodextrin, which dries the vinegar so it can be applied to the warm, crispy chips. And voila, what’s old is new again.

Engineered for crispness, enhanced with appealing flavours and designed for pleasure, the potato chip has grown from the humblest of tubers to develop into a worldwide market valued at some $35 billion (USD). That’s one blue chip industry.

Can’t read just one story about potato chips? Here’s more.

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Museum of Crisps

Homeostatic vs Hedonic Hunger Drivers in Human Beings

This Farm Helps Make 2 Million Potato Chip Packets A Day