CORONA DEL MAR TODAY

Weird Flavors Waste Time and Money

Oops, I did it again. I bought a weird flavor of chips. I wanted BBQ Baked Lays, but instead I picked up a bag of Southwestern Ranch. This really irks me, because I really try not to buy (and eat) chips, and I feel as if the Chips Gods were telling me that I shouldn’t be indulging. Really — who wants Southwestern Ranch baked chips that look like BBQ? No one, that’s who.

(If I’m wrong, let me know and I will meet you somewhere and pass this bag of nastiness to you. Oops — my husband just opened them and ate one and threw the bag away. I won’t repeat what he said.)

This is happening all the time, this mis-buying of products. Manufacturers are going nuts making flavors of everything. I recently bought Wheat Thins that I believed would be plain, but instead were basil-parm flavored. How many times have you bought a can of tomatoes and later found it was laced with basil or garlic or another fake flavor? It is worse when you don’t notice this until too late — after you’ve dumped the basil tomatoes into some Mexican dish, for example. Ask me how I know this.

I think flavors of standard products are fine — go crazy with your pickle Pringles or your Haggis World Cup crisps. But I do think the labels should be different colors. Neon, maybe.

You should not have a bag of chips that looks like BBQ down to the chip on the front, and in tiny letters say it’s something else.