Everything you ever wanted to know about crisps

Crunch, Natalie Whittle’s account of how the humble crisp took over the world, mixes fascinating trivia with nostalgia and personal tales

4/5
On taking my first British pub quiz, a few months into my student visa, I experienced acute culture-shock vis-à-vis crisps – or chips, as my fellow Americans would call them. We were handed a print-out showing eight different Walkers packets. The flavours – some active, some discontinued – had all been edited out, so we had to write down the correct one based on the packet colour alone. We had 10 minutes, and we used none of it, because we had more questions than answers. Is there a big difference between cheese and onion, versus sour cream and onion? Prawn cocktail: yea or nay? And why, I kept wondering, was it “ready salted” – not “plain salted”, or just “salted”? 
Natalie Whittle could have told me. The phrase “ready salted” is a relic from when packets came with tiny blue “screws” of salt that you would add to the crisps yourself. At one factory, these sachets were twisted by a team of “girls”, then by 15 sachet-twisting machines that cost £750 each (£44,000 today). Nowadays, curtains of powdered flavour do the salting, but that initial participatory aspect set the tone for other crisp rituals, such as baking an empty bag in the oven and watching it shrink to the size of a matchbox. Or – as two British friends who grew up in the 1980s fondly recalled – turning them into pins or keyrings. Or simply tearing them open lengthwise, like books, so that the contents would be easier for pub companions to reach. 
In Crunch: An Ode to Crisps, Whittle, a journalist and editor, tells the story of how this reliable snack became a cornerstone of British food culture. She offers just the right amount of personal narrative to anchor us while covering 150 years of history, from the first “potato pearls” spotted in Paris to how Walkers creates postmodern flavours such as Cheese Toastie with Heinz Baked Beans (currently available in a limited edition). The book moves deftly between the broad (corporate mergers) and the particular (the author walking through a potato field), with many a fascinating fact. Did you know, for instance, that a line of crisps called The Whole Shabang is sold only in American prisons and offered in just one flavour, namely a composite of several different flavours from barbecue to salt and vinegar? (Admittedly, some light research informs me that The Whole Shabang has become available to everyone, after high demand from ex-cons and interested members of the public, and a second flavour, called Extreme, has been added. It’s spicier, with ridges.)
Nostalgia is present throughout Crunch, whether Whittle is reminiscing about the French crisps she ate on childhood holidays, or describing mid-1990s adverts that show Gary Lineker affably greeting fans before snatching a bag of crisps from a child. She nods to popular discontinued flavours like Worcestershire sauce and Oxo beef stock cubes. Even so, Whittle’s book doesn’t feel weighed down by a simple yearning for simpler times; Whittle embraces imported crisps and what you might call “flavour diversity”. Sweet chilli crisps, after all, were once considered exotic; perhaps teriyaki, garam masala or truffle might be next in line to join Britain’s crisp canon.
Whittle’s gift for storytelling elevates Crunch to something of real literary substance. In a chapter on wartime, she talks about potato codependency: people were tired of the humble spud, but acknowledged its importance to the war effort. Temporary laws were drafted to allow for child labour during the harvest. A pilot aboard a French liner saw an on-board swimming pool drained of water and filled instead with potatoes. This is a neat example of a theme Whittle injects throughout: “How well potatoes can disguise deprivation itself, by being just enough – no more – for survival.” Crisps, in general, may be beloved, but they’re fundamentally unsatisfying: they’re filler food between lunch and dinner, meal-deal appendages. 
I particularly enjoyed the chapters about corporatisation. In one instance that reads like an Armando Iannucci satire, Whittle tells us about a bullish attempt from the PepsiCo suits in America to make tortilla chips popular in the UK. They flew a team from the Midlands out to the USA for a road trip to meet, as Whittle puts it, “every last Doritos guru”. The line was drawn, however, when PepsiCo tried to change the Walkers name to Lays. Interviewee Larry Bush, a member of Walkers’s research and development team, called this “an affront to our heritage”.
Whittle often allows details and quotes to carry her story. Instead of explaining what we already know – that modern life has stripped the dignity from many lower-paying jobs – she tells us how delivery drivers used to have tailored uniforms, with their laundry bills paid. Then PepsiCo took over and left those workers with “stupid overalls… they didn’t look right. The smartness was gone.” This is refreshing and somewhat unexpected from a history book, but then again, Crunch calls itself an “ode”, not a study.
My only gripe is that sometimes Whittle presents a fascinating concept or storyline then fails to follow through. She tells us, for instance, of a lecture given by the eminent Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, in which he posited that nobody invented the omelette. Rather, he said, it was inevitable, one of those foods that were bound to happen naturally. Whittle puts potato crisps in this category – “or at least that’s how it appears now” – but I wasn’t quite convinced. I might have been, if we’d sat with the idea for another paragraph or two. 
The same is true of a chapter on manufacturing, which talks of automated technology (“the ever-thinning presence of humans”), then the invisible crisp manufacturers behind brands such as M&S, then shrinkflation – “fewer crisps, more air, same packet sizes” – but it all peters out after 11 pages. The topic of Britain’s rising obesity is mentioned but not delved into; diabetes isn’t mentioned at all. Perhaps this is less an oversight, more a decision to keep the tone light. But it’s a missed opportunity, especially because I trust that Whittle would have done a good job balancing seriousness with levity. 
For the most part, however, she’s thorough, whether detailing the logistics of industrial production or analysing the class implications of posh crisps such as sea salt and balsamic vinegar, that gourmet glow-up of a trusty classic. In equal parts fun and intelligent, Crunch has the satisfying flavour of Ready Salted, not the confused, try-hard air of Cheese Toastie with Heinz Baked Beans – which, I predict, will be a passing fad in Britain’s enduring love of crisps. 
Crunch is published by Faber & Faber at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
4/5
1/5