Do you remember in 1991 when Sun Chips were released? Man, I do. I dunno if it was specific to my college, or a Pacific Northwest thing, or if this was true nationwide, but they were like a Big Deal in these parts, heralding a new era in snacks in which you would no longer simply opt for something delicious and terrible for you and could now agonize over whether to pay more for something you’d enjoy less. It got so bad at the Evergreen State College that if you bought anything other than them at the campus store you had to avert your eyes from the Sun Chips in shame.

Sun Chips were recently in the news again. Frito Lay had been selling them in new-fangled compostable packaging, but had to rollback to the earlier bags because the new ones crinkled so loud it sounded like a forest fire in your ears. We have compostable coffee cups in my place of business, so I know first-hand what a pain this variety of packaging is (and causes). As near as I can tell, the compostable coffee cups protect the environment in the following manner:

1. Coffee is dispensed into the compostable cup.
2. While you are carrying the beverage back to your office, the acidic coffee seeps through the corn-based material.
3. You receive a burn from the scalding hot liquid.
4. Eventually you come to associate excruciating pain with coffee consumption.
5. As millions of office workers swear off java altogether, the need for coffee plantations plummets and thousands of acres of rainforest are spared from the bulldozer.

Rating: These are not as unpalatable as I remember, perhaps because 20 years of increasingly “healthy” snacks make them taste pretty good by comparison. In fact, while these will never be my first choice, I could actually see myself eating them again. A pity I can’t hear myself eating them, on account of the bag. 45¢/$1

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 6:04 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.