Ketchup Chips

I want to talk about ketchup chips for a moment. In the food world Ketchup chips are quiet anomalous as they are two degrees of simulation. Ketchup is a simulated tomato sauce product and ketchup chips are simulated ketchup flavor. I've always believed that if we moved to three degrees of simulation the world would instantly implode. So if there's any food scientists out there working on a product that is simulated ketchup potato chip flavor please stop now and save us all.

The strangest thing about it is to imagine how far away the potato chip ketchup seasoning is from a tomato growing in a field (or on a vine??? I don't know how the hell it grows (which kinda proves my point about how disconnected we are from our food)). Its not even close. Ketchup doesn't taste anything like a tomato and ketchup chips barely taste like ketchup.

Why all this talk about ketchup chips? Well I recently started eating them again after spending 8 years avoiding them. Why avoid them? You may ask (despite the fairly obviousl reason I mentioned earlier)

let me tell the tale:
The year was 1998 and I worked a job that ended at 11pm, naturally I would stay up all night and sleep all day. One average day at about 2am I was hungry so I went to the 24hr supermarket to buy food. I bought 1 bag of ketchup chips, 1 bottle of cherry coke and most important 1 sub sandwich from the deli counter fridge that had been reduced to clear because it had reached its expiry date. When I say it reached its expiry date I don't mean that at the stroke of midnight (2 hours earlier) it had expired I mean that it had past its prime the day earlier at probably 8am, which is also most likely when it was slapped with the reduced to clear sticker. I figured what the fuck I save $1 (I was 20 at the time and a lot more hapless, nowadays I'm pretty fucking neurotic about food probably due in large part to experiences like this one). Anyway I went home to eat my food. The sub had reached the point where the bread was really soggy from the moisture of the lettuce and tomato and mayo and all the flavors of the thing had sort of melded into one another so each individual item of the sandwich tasted exactly the same and generally had the exact same texture. Seriously, I probably would have failed a blind taste test trying to guess what was a tomato, an onion or a slice of ham. But I ate it anyway along with the ketchup chips and cherry coke. It didn't take too long before I realized that it wasn't sitting well and so it all came back out. Now if you think that those food items seem like a disgusting combination to eat just imagine what they're like on the return voyage.

Why quit eating ketchup chips for so long because of this? I believe that we have some inherent instinct in us to avoid foods that make us sick. I often think about the thousands of years of trial and error that we (as a race) must have gone through discovering what could and couldn't be eaten. Fuck we even know down to which herbs and spices are edible so obviously there was a hell of a lot of experimentation going on. Even if you don't believe in evolution I don't think you can deny this. Its not as if God held a banquet and laid out all the plants on earth and said "these one's are edible and these ones are poisonous". Well in Genesis he first says "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;" (minus the knowledge one of course) but then when we (mankind) get banished from Eden he says "cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field." Maybe by the thorns and thistles he was saying that some of the shit out there will make you sick. Who knows. Anyway we obviously developed defenses over time to protect ourselves from the things we ingested. When we smell something that is rancid or rotten we instinctively know that it is bad its not as though we have been taught that. I don't remember the class in school when they taught us that a rose is a good scent and rotting meat is bad.

So that's the deal and now I'm sitting here eating ketchup chips with a glass of coke (not cherry coke, I wont touch that shit).