167. What's your favourite flavour?
And are they crisps, chips or schips?
In which Rebecca explores idiosyncrasies of the international snack-tionary, insists that anything but green packaging for cheese & onion crisps is a crime, and shares why it might be an advantage that crisp packets don’t degrade.
Dear Reader,
Over here, most crunchy snacks in packets are called crisps. Chips, on the other hand, are deep-fried Jenga blocks of potato – known across the pond as fries – to accompany battered fish from the chippy or the kids’ sausages at teatime.
Skinny chips served alongside, for example, a burger are French fries across the pond, and sometimes – not always, because, heck, they’re still chips! – called fries in UK.
In Australia, crisps are called chips, whereas British-style chips are hot chips.
🤯
Confused? Well, let me help you:
Living as an au pair in Germany I was fascinated to find that snacks were sold in enormous packets, rather than the single-serving format I was used to at home. My host family would generally open one of these bags of crisps, sorry, chips – which they pronounced schips – at the weekend, and tip its contents into a large bowl to pass around.
With evidence to the contrary entirely absent during my eight-month stay I concluded that in Germany one could buy any flavour of schips crisps as long as it was paprika.
🙄
I was amazed to see this newspaper article earlier in the summer reporting that a litter-picking group had found a crisp packet dating back nearly thirty years.
The Walkers crisp packet, which had an expiry date in 1997, remained well-preserved, with little degradation. A spokesperson for Recoup – an independent authority on plastic recycling – said the find was concerning as it showed how long litter remained in the environment.
Given that I am in almost complete denial about my rapidly-advancing years1, my subconscious brain doesn’t register 1997 as being all that long ago. I was already an adult when the best before date for that packet of Walkers cheese & onion passed; in fact, 1997 was the year I graduated from university. Shockingly, it’s actually 27 years since both my formal education and the date for the optimum consumption of those crisps expired.
I remember a friend’s exclamation of delight outside the Village Stores when she recognised something on the bag of crisps she’d just bought. ‘The expiry date on these is my birthday!’ she told me. ‘Oh, okay’, I replied, confused, feeling that her reaction was only proportionate if she was intending the crisps to be an only-just-in-date gift to herself on her next birthday to come.
‘But don’t you know what this MEANS?’ she asked. ‘My birthday will be on a SATURDAY!’
Reader, she knew something I didn’t about the expiry dates printed on crisp packets. Let me show you what it was.
I procured a bag of every type of crisps for sale at the Village Stores last week, then raided my parents’ larder for more evidence. Here’s a spreadsheet showing my research results, with the columns showing expiry dates coloured green:
Why is it, though, that all crisps expire on a Saturday? 🤔
I turned to Google, anticipating a similar kind of joy to what I’d seen in my birthday-crisps friend.
Reader, I was disappointed. 😕
A spokesperson for Walkers explained in this article in the Metro newspaper:
‘In the manufacturing sites we work on production weeks which start on a Sunday. All product produced in that week will have the same Best Before date. As the week ends on the Saturday, the Best Before date will always end on a Saturday.’
Oh well. Now we know. 🥱
Do crisp packets have a life beyond their containment of crisps? Well yes, certainly, and in both good ways and bad.
NOT GOOD ✖️
In an article in The Guardian on Monday July 29 headlined ‘Plastic bag litter on beaches falls 80% since fees imposed’ I learned that in 2023 the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) had reported the following survey data:
97% of UK beaches had drinks-related litter, such as bottles and cans, and 4,684 plastic bags. Overall, there was a 1.2% increase in plastic litter across the UK, with an average of 167 items per 100 metres.
The most common five items found were plastic pieces measuring 2.5cm to 30cm, packets such as crisp and sandwich wrappers, caps and lids, plastic string and cord, and plastic bottles and containers.
GOOD ✔️
Volunteers at the Crisp Packet Project, founded in 2019 by Pen Huston from St Leonards, East Sussex, make a range of survival items for distribution to people living on the streets. Crisp packets are slit open, washed and heat-sealed using a domestic iron between two layers of plastic packaging which would otherwise be disposed of, to make survival blankets, bivi bags and ponchos.
They work because the crisp packets’ silver side reflects your heat back into your body. The strong materials in the crisp packets plus the plastic fused onto the packets make this a supple, strong, long-lasting material.
Text taken from crisppacketproject.com.
This BBC News article describes the work of one of the project’s young volunteers.
As children, my brother and I would occasionally be taken by our parents to a nearby pub garden on a summer’s afternoon to meet up with family friends. Entering the bar under the age of fourteen was forbidden by licensing laws, so we kids would wait outside for one of the adults to bring us a bottle of Coke and a straw each, and a selection of Golden Wonder crisps to fight over choose from. I would eat only the cheese & onion variety, and to this day I don’t know whether my insistence for those was because they tasted the nicest, or whether it was because they were in green packets – my favourite colour.
Cheese & onion crisp packets were green, salt & vinegar were blue, ready-salted were bright red, smoky bacon dark red, barbecue beef were brown and prawn cocktail – oh, so exotic! – were pink.
Golden Wonder was the brand of the moment when I was a child, but then I started noticing more and more packets labelled ‘Walkers’.2
And the people at Walkers crisps have a different idea about matching flavours with packet colours. Walkers cheese & onion crisps come in a blue packet, with green denoting salt & vinegar. 🤯
The horror!
Whether your favourite flavour of chips schips crisps is cheese & onion IN A GREEN PACKET, salt & vinegar, or – dare I say it? – paprika, there’s no denying that our love for crunchy snacks is going to be around for a very long time. But so that their packaging isn’t, by donating it to amazing projects to make valuable use of, by always taking our litter home with us and leading by example so as to encourage others to do the same, we can perhaps ensure that volunteer litter pickers will one day NOT be finding crisp packets dated 2024 and beyond.
Now, I know you want to, so go on, check the expiry date on the back of your nearest crisp packet. I wonder if it’s a Saturday? 😉
Love,
Rebecca
If you’ve enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’, please share and subscribe for free.
My fiftieth birthday looms. 🫣
Walkers crisps have the brand name Lays in other parts of the world.
I'm currently "on holiday" (to use the British expression), and have household access to a much wider selection of crunchy snacks than usual, a desire of the host to satisfy all visitors, I suppose. I just checked three bags. Two Tuesdays, a Thursday and a Monday. So, I guess the system is set up differently here. 🤣
I'd say all our fries are French fries, but fries for short, no matter how fat or slender they are. We're just too lazy to bother with the burden of an extra word, except if the potatoes are cubed up and pan fried, rather than deep-fried, and served with breakfast, at which point they become "home fries."
Language is such fun!
I love the survival blankets and ponchos. What a fabulous idea to make something useful from an otherwise wasteful package. Thanks for sharing that especially, Rebecca.
I read your post first this morning, Rebecca, then went on to try to catch up on other Substack reading. I could not concentrate on anything! All I could think of was crisps...vinegar and salt crisps, bags and bags of them. They are forbidden to me because of the high salt content, which, of course, only makes me want them more, because I am human. I just poached two eggs for my breakfast. A poor substitution if you ask me... If I believed in Heaven, I know there would be crisps involved. Great writing, my girl!