Dakota Style Honey Mustard Kettle Chips

The bag is green. The chips are slightly yellow. . .

I am assured by "Spud" the tractor-driving potato in a straw hat on the top left of the bag that these chips are made of a better potato. (they guarantee it!)  These potatoes go to a veggie day-spa where they are lovingly bathed and scrubbed.  They are then dumped like a truck-load of silently screaming lemmings into a thick-gaged industrial slicer.  To limit the amount of stress on the potatoes, knowing of their impending doom, the whole process of washing to deadly slicing takes less than an hour.  Too much stress before a potato's demise can concentrate negative flavonoids in the flesh of the spud.  This obviously reflects poorly on the finished product, which we want to be clean, fresh, and crisp with no taste of murder most foul.

However, these chips must have been made from potatoes lingered in the hot-tub long after they knew what awaited them after their bath, and so they suffered that mental anguish of one's own imminent severed mortal coil for days.  While the initial aroma from the freshly split bag was at first somewhat vegetal and musky, it soon took on a not unpleasant odor of a mediocre brown mustard. Upon tasting these fine sloughings of potato death I was gently assaulted by the taste of both bland mustard and honey (if that honey were stolen from bee-prison where the inmates were trying to make toilet hooch from their ill-gotten flower nectar).  The honey had a tang to it that may have been part mustard, and may have been part green rot.  And then the texture reared its ugly head, not unlike a horse drowning in thick ropey molasses would breach through the surface to gasp a last breath before sinking to a sucrosian liquid tomb.

The initial crunch that suggested these potatoes were given a clean death was, upon the second or sometimes third mastication, replaced by a gumminess of such viscosity as to be outright chewy. The flavor did not subside, either, instead intensifying upon continued enamel pummeling until, after the mass was finally purged past the epiglottis, a lingering sensation of vague horse radish twang remained. I do not think I shall try this variety of potato chip again, I have seen into its dark malaise and do not wish to subject my soul to that anguish again.

Perhaps some day Spud will realize the horrors he has been akin to, as he leads his own people to a genocide of pseudo-crispiness.  The flavor of that dark extermination breaking through into this bag tuberous corpses...

1.6/5.0

(I have a really boring lunch break...)