Confessions of a crisp addict

I have always and I will always love crisps. As cashiers check banknotes, I hold each crisp up to the light and admire its soak of industrial, golden oil, wondering at its unrepeatable, fried imperfections. A raw potato slice, now creatively misshapen and curled. All the while, I anticipate the crunch.

Most obsessions end. But this one replenishes itself. I will keep eating crisps, and yet they will never diminish. By the time I reach the bottom hem of a packet, crumbs and splinters are there, but they are not the end of anything. And no matter that I can never own a bag of crisps – only buy and eat them – I will have possession of another bag of crisps in my future. I am always preparing to eat more. Which is to say that I suppose, in a way – in their own small way – crisps are part of what I live for.

It is hard to escape the strange connective force of crisps in British life. They punctuate workdays and complete meal deals and they bridge the hunger gap between afternoons and evenings. They go well with vices, surprise dull sandwiches and, in dire circumstances, they are just enough to sustain us. They’re well travelled but vanish before the destination, crunched away between cities and towns and backwaters and bus stops. They slip unscathed in and out of different social classes, at once supremely ordinary and underrated for their weirdness. Until I wrote a book about crisps, I had never tried to explain to myself how or why a 1970s dinner-party dish became my favourite crisp flavour. I was too busy enjoying my prawn cocktail reverie.

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Crisps are the most pleasurable, multi-dimensional and seemingly harmless source of deceit. I even admit enjoying the false promise I make to myself when opening a big packet and vowing not to eat it all in one go. It’s a lie: of course I won’t have the self-restraint, but the little crumb of its possibility tastes good.

But even as I crave them, I realise a pouch of potato chips is a kind of meanness, as much as a repeated abundance. A bag of crisps is half air, half product, and brevity is inbuilt, as if the little rectangle is all but designed to breed my want. Multipack bags of crisps are only five grammes heavier than the reduced chocolate rations handed to surveilled citizens in George Orwell’s nightmare, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Is 25g all our appetite is worth? Are crisps enough?

Your own crisp references may be different – earlier, later – but with the same inevitable tangle of nostalgia. My lost love – my weird, beloved Walkers Worcester Sauce – might not be the same as yours (does anyone miss Walkers Roast Lamb & Mint?), but we inhabit the same fondness for a crisp out of reach.

If you’re unfamiliar with this territory in British life, you may already be starting to ask: is there something wrong with this person? In my defence, I can confidently say I am not the only one who has displayed the crisp commitment. My memory is of lots of children revelling in crisps just as much as I did. Crisp jewellery was great, foreign crisps were interesting, crisp-packet shrinking felt inspired. The sheer variety of crisp-eating – melting prawn cocktail Skips, brittle bacon Frazzles – combined with the sub-breeds of snacks that weren’t classic crisps, such as Scampi Fries and Pringles, made the pursuit an odyssey. Nobody under the age of 12 would argue against it.

The world’s best crisps: Natalie Whittle’s edit

The crisp world continues to be a jungle. Under the canopy of potato products, there is a teeming mass of other sub-crisp species. Pork puffs. Chickpea curls. Lentil chips. Popped cheesies. Crunchy corn. Kosher wheat twists. Seaweed wafers. They all belong together, as part of the wider snack ecosystem. Except in the view of His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, which greets different classes of product with a spectrum of more or less appealing taxes. Remember the semantic confusion that exploded when Procter & Gamble, owner of the Pringles brand, successfully pleaded to the British High Court that Pringles were not, in fact, potato chips, and thereby exempt from VAT, but subsequently lost the case in 2009 at the Court of Appeal? 

All this preceded the tidal wave of nutritional education that swept crisp culture away from “child’s paradise” towards a bleaker landscape of “consume in moderation”. The shelves of the local Spar used to pad out row upon row with individual crisp packets, plumped up neatly like fluorescent artillery. There were no warnings, no glaring calorie counts, no traffic lights for fat and heart attacks. Though it was clear that crisps weren’t the finest foodstuffs and no health match for a blameless apple or banana, we didn’t live with the pill of national knowledge, disseminated through doctors’ surgeries and television adverts. To a 1980s child, public health was about as relevant as a bank building.

Crucially, crisp companies made the most of this moment by devising all their products as if they were children themselves. They understood, earlier than most industries, the capital potential of a child’s sometimes strange desire for escape. It wasn’t just about coming up with a good flavour; it was also about satisfying a child’s natural and brutal intelligence by doing something unimpeachably and recognisably clever. Good crisps were the acme of humour, imagination and fun.

Something about this approach was peculiarly British. As I found in the supermarkets of Brittany on childhood holidays, French food manufacturers weren’t that bothered about signing up children to a crisp religion that would separate them from their pocket money. They were too busy feeding them “real” food, not needing the crutch of powdered flavour. 

British food manufacturers were in on a different game, one that proved hugely lucrative, and drew a path towards a new British diet fed by fun but dangerously carefree (perhaps careless) about health. For me, this has lasted a lifetime. On the special occasions when my childhood home filled with people for holiday-slideshow dinners, the role the children played happily was to circle the room as crisp waiting staff, pacing from person to person with a bowl as the Kodak pictures clicked onto the projector. At parties now, the sight of crisp bowls beckons to me, through habit, like the face of a person I know. Good crisp routines have meanwhile been repeated into entitlements: crisps as the ritual before family dinners and nights out, crisps as the small cheer of train rides and crisps as the small consolation of countless hurried lunch breaks.

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When I first joined the Financial Times in a junior pool of night-shift subeditors, a misfitting newspaper world began to colour itself in. I discovered the evening canteen served some glorious steamed puddings, but also superbly eccentric salads. You could withdraw cash, exchange coins and buy stamps from machines on the top floor, like a cross between a post office and a casino. By way of befriendment amid the confusion, my desk neighbour, Dennis, offered me cigars at our 10pm dinner breaks. Nothing made perfect sense to me except for the sound of the managing editor – an old-fashioned and brilliant newspaper man – banging furious fists on the vending machine when he found it empty of salt-and-vinegar just before his planned nightly escape to the smoking room.

Are Brits the leaders globally when it comes to consuming snacks? Far from it. By one measure at least, the global crown of snacking belongs to Japan, where in 2022 per-capita volume sales amounted to 34 kilos – way ahead of the UK at just over five and a half kilos in the same year. (Snacks in this data set included cookies and crackers, potato chips, tortilla chips, flips and pretzels.) In the $98bn market for potato chips alone, the greatest revenue share is generated in the US, where sales were forecast to reach $33bn in 2024. The point of difference is that the UK regards crisps almost as a national dish, a proprietary part of Britishness, as if the blue and green packets of cheese-and-onion and salt-and-vinegar meant as much patriotically as the red breast of a postbox.

Of course, as soon as a nation has a cipher, it exposes itself to the revelation of its good, bad and most human sides. Crisps represent British humour and a flair for invention. But on a number of occasions, they’ve been props in more serious drama. The annals of British case law are littered with mentions of crisp packets, like the aftermath of a particularly chaotic party. Per the records of court hearings, judges have heard how crisps were stolen, how they were left abandoned on pallets for months waiting for import paperwork to be filled, how tubs of them were smashed in anger as preludes to violence, how they provided solace for the infirm and vulnerable, how they were given as parenting bribes in custody disputes and how they were remembered as part of the incidental fabric of days overshadowed by life-altering trauma.

I decided to write a book on crisps in an attempt to understand what I was oblivious to as a child – that crisps are a complicated novelty. And I am interested in the way crisps are an activated product – how they need crisp-eaters to create the crunch, otherwise they would not be crisp at all: they would be unheard, uncrunched, stale and eventually soft inside unopened bags. Crisps need actors to come to life. What kind of theatre does that make us?  

Extract taken from Crunch by Natalie Whittle, published by Faber & Faber on 10 October