Reply #17: Artificially flavored means they use fake vinegar

[jmowreader]

This is no shit. Fake vinegar.

I got hooked on Smiths Crisps salt and vinegar crisps when I was in Berlin. The British post exchange (called Naafi, for Navy-Army-Air Force Institute) contracted with a British church in Berlin to run their roach coach operation. Every day they'd come to the field station with a Volkswagen bus full of these little sandwiches made on brotchen, pastries, British tea, British sodas and crisps. I find British tea to be disgusting (they make it with milk, which I do not care for but the British people love it. My dislike of British tea only means that there is more for them.) but the pastries were excellent, the sodas were pretty good, the sandwiches were very good...but this is about crisps.

Smiths Crisps are flavoured with real vinegar and real sea salt. They have a delicate tang and a pleasantly salty flavour. Unfortunately, they also have Beef flavour. Frank Zappa was very right--Lord, have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat.

Then I got sent to NCO school in Massachusetts. Sitting in the PX was a big bag of Lay's Salt and Vinegar Chips. This is real MI food, so I got one and went back to my room with it. After four years of the excellent Smiths crisps, the Lay's were a definite shock. Imagine taking the battery out of your car, removing the caps and dumping it into a bag of potato chips.

Turns out that most of the chip makers in the US use "sodium diacetate" which is a powdered vinegar substitute. They can load it into the same machine that flavors their other chips. It also makes the chips taste awful.

Buy a bag of Cape Cod Salt and Vinegar Chips, which are made with real vinegar, and you will never eat "artificially flavored" S&Vs again.