"chip" news and stories

On Thursday morning, residents of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina were in for a bit of a surprise, especially those who liked Doritos. A damaged tractor-trailer-size shipping container washed up on the beach, bringing with it thousands of bags of the Doritos -- Cool Ranch, Nacho Cheese and Spicy Nacho -- that it contained. Locals, from shopkeepers to fishermen, grabbed as many bags as they could carry from the water and from where they lay strewn on the sand. One person even filled up a pickup truck with them - all in the name of "helping with cleanup," of course. The chips were almost entirely undamaged, thanks to their airtight packaging.

The feeding frenzy only lasted through the morning, as the container was secured, still containing an undetermined number of bags of chips, by the late afternoon. The boat that lost the container has not been tracked down yet, although the missing shipment is sure to be noticed when the crew reaches its eventual destination.

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Potatoes are the most popular vegetable in the US and most of them are eaten in some fried form, such as potato chips or french fries. One medium potato represents one of the five servings of vegetables that you are supposed to eat every day, and it doesn't take many french fries to reach the size of a single potato. Because of this, it is not impressive to hear that companies like Frito-Lay and Kraft want to add vegetable-based chips and snacks to their product lines. The potato chips are already vegetable-based!

Adding dehydrated vegetables to snacks like Roasted Vegetable Ritz Crackers is just a way of getting consumers to buy more by capitalizing on a trend for an increased awareness for healthy eating. This doesn't mean that people are necessarily eating healthier, but they think that they are/should be. They will opt for the chip that has some additional "vegetables" in it because it sounds like it might be healthier, regardless of whether it actually is. One trend tracking company said "this may replace the whole-grain fad."

And is there anything behind it? Probably not. A fried chip is still not health food, regardless of whether the chip is potato or carrot. And as for adding bits of veggies to other foodstuffs, nutritionist Cynthia Lair explained the benefits - or lack thereof - by saying "once you pulverize and powder vegetables, there's not much left."

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The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is mounting a campaign to educate Britons about "hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods" to give people some perspective on the foods that they are putting into their bodies and to try to encourage healthy eating habits. Their focus, for the moment, is on crisps. A survey done by the BHF revealed that 49% of children from 8-15 ate at least one package of chips (crisps) each day, and 20% ate two or more. They are consuming roughly 5-liters of cooking oil every year at that rate, or about 1 1/3 gallons.

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

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Baked chips, when compared to regular fried chips, lack a certain something. They don't have the flavor or texture of regular chips and this is especially true in the case of tortilla chips. Eating Well set out to taste test some healthier chips and noticed, when reading the labels, that not all fried chips are equally "bad" for you - and many had more fiber and less sodium than their flavorless baked counterparts, with only a few more grams of fat. Out of 20 different chips tested, they picked out their top choices.

• RW Garcia Stone Ground (140 cal., 4g fat/.5g saturated, 4g fiber per 1-oz serving) - This brand got the "smart choice" award from the reviewers, who described them as being "authentic" and having a "great corn flavor." As an added bonus, each serving only had 40mg of sodium, the lowest in the test group.
• Santitas White Corn (130 cal., 6g fat/1g saturated, 1g fiber per 1-oz serving) - Salty, corny and crunchy, these chips actually had less sodium than most of the chips in the taste test. They weren't high in the fiber department, though.

A banana chip is a thin, deep-fried slice of banana. Once fried, the slightly sweet chips are crisp (often bordering on rock-hard) and oily. Because they look like fruit, some people mistake these for a healthy snack, but they are far from good for you. A one ounce serving has about 150 calories and 9.5 grams of fat, almost all of it saturated.

On Trader Joe's top 100 list, they included something called banana crisps. I only tried them recently, since nearby Trader Joe's seemed to be perpetually sold out of them. Unlike the traditional deep-fried diet disasters, these chips are baked. They are ultra-thin and akin to an ordinary potato chip in both looks and flavor, and actually make a great substitute for regular potato chips because they don't taste very banana-like at all, though they are slightly sweet rather than salty. Best of all, each one ounce (2/3 cup) serving has only 40 calories and 1 gram of fat.

[Banana crisp image via Trader Joe's Fan, which has a great review of them, too)