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The History of American Chip Flavors | J.J. McCullough | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The History of American Chip Flavors
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This content explores the origins and cultural evolution behind the "American potato chip flavor canon," specifically the four dominant flavors: plain, sour cream and onion, barbecue, and salt and vinegar, tracing their roots through American history, immigration, and industrialization.
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Hello friends my name is JJ and one
topic that I've had a lot of fun making
videos about lately is this idea of the
American cultural Canon a canon in the
one n non bang bang sense of the word
refers to an official list of things
that are understood to be part of a
recognized set and when it comes to
Contemporary American culture there are
all sorts of standardized sets of things
that are fun to explore in the past
we've done a video on the American
monster cannon that includes Franken
Stein Dracula and the mummy as well as
one on the American candy flavor Cannon
which includes lemon lime orange
strawberry and Cherry and today we are
going to talk about the American potato
chip flavor Cannon so when it comes to
the bestselling flavors of potato chip
in the United States the big four
consists of plain sour cream and onion
barbecue and salt and vinegar living on
this continent you just sort of take
these flavors for granted as normal and
probably don't often in pause to ponder
just how unique and arbitrary they are
in many foreign countries after all
their potato chip flavor Cannon is
completely different I remember when I
was in Holland pepper flavor chips in
the sense of green or red pepper flavor
were very common in many parts of Asia
meanwhile shrimp flavor is one of their
standards these are grilled prawn flavor
from Thailand even in America itself
there was a time when some companies
were trying to make peanut butter
flavored chips a thing but let us just
take a step back a bit and talk about
how potato chips came to be in the first
place because we cannot begin to talk
about flavors before getting into the
uniquely American history of this most
American of
snacks so potatoes are actually
indigenous to the United States with the
wild versions of the plant found mostly
in the southern half of the country it
was in Latin and South America however
where potatoes of the sort we know today
were first actively cultivated as a
versatile Food Source by the native
peoples It is believed that the Spanish
brought Poes to Europe sometime in the
late 16th century but because they were
so easy to grow even on really bad land
they quickly became associated with
peasants and were looked down on by the
European Elite as gross farmer food Only
The Wretched eat the roots was
apparently a common saying at the time
this was much less the case in the
humble and Democratic United States
however who really took to farming
potatoes in both the colonial and
postcolonial eras add in an influx of
Irish immigrants whose potato eating
ways had made them the subject of weird
scorn in Europe and by the 19th century
potatoes had become a very mainstream
American food enjoyed by men and women
of all social classes in fact in
Victorian era America potatoes were even
served at some of the country's most
fancy restaurants like Moon's Lakehouse
in classy Saratoga Springs New York
there is a very famous story about this
place that I'm sure you've heard about
how the restaurant had this very snotty
cook who really hated customers who sent
back the food and then one day in 1853
the great railroad Tycoon Cornelius
vanderbelt tried to send back some
potato dish that he considered
undercooked and the chef went ballistic
and responded by trying to make him the
most repulsive potato Abomination he
could muster but instead he just wound
up creating potato chips and everybody
loved them according to this excellent
book on the history of potato chips
however there doesn't seem to be a lot
of hard evidence that this story
actually happened although potato chips
were almost certain invented at this
restaurant the author seems to think it
is more likely that The Cook's sister
actually invented them in a less
theatrically compelling accident but in
any case the Saratoga chips as they were
first known were quickly put on the menu
of restaurants and stores across New
York and then surrounding states as well
particularly Ohio and Pennsylvania which
even today are said to have the
strongest potato chip culture in the US
the industry even refers to this part of
America as the potato chip belt just
because of how nuts people are for chips
in this area if you are from there you
can tell me if this Rings true so much
like candy potato chips only really
started to go mainstream in the early
20s century when Factory technology of
the late Industrial Revolution allowed
machines to process and peel and fry
potatoes at a massive scale as well as
seal them in little bags of wax paper or
foil that could be individually sold at
stores before then you had to buy chips
in bulk with the scoop like nuts now
America didn't really have a lot of
Nationwide food brands and until after
World War II a lot of the big iconic
companies that exist today are simply
the result of Savvy entrepreneurs buying
up a bunch of smaller Regional companies
and this was definitely the case with
chips throughout the 1930s 40s and 50s a
big company called Frito and another
company called Lei went to ruin the US
buying up all of the small chip
companies before merging into a single
giant chip conglomerate called freto l
in 1962 this company then merged with
Pepsi in 1965 creating a snack food
Juggernaut that still produces over 60%
of all chips sold in America second
place is Pringles which was a brand
created by the Proctor and Gamble
Corporation in 1971 the rise of these
companies heralded the dawn of a more
uniform standard of potato chip across
the United States in terms of shape
Crunch and of course flavor but first
onions so onions originate somewhere in
the Far East and were brought to Europe
by the Romans like potatoes onions are
also a pretty simple thing to grow and
as a result the Europeans had a lot of
similar snobbery towards people who grew
or ate them as a result although what's
interesting is that in this case it was
a very northern Europe versus southern
Europe sort of thing in England
especially from about the 17th century
on onions were considered an extremely
low class sort of food with people who
ate a lot of onions and thus smelled
like onions being considered the most
repulsive sort of person in the real old
days there was even a thinking that the
Pung Taste of onions would rile up your
blood and make you violent or horny but
in other parts of Europe it was a
completely different story the Spanish
Greeks and Italians all ate a lot of
onions which the British would cite as
evidence of their moral superiority over
the continent although it was sometimes
a bit surprising to the Brits that even
the French who they thought of as being
closer to their civilizational equals
ate onions too in this book about the
history of onions it describes the
British poet Percy Shelly visiting
France in the early 1800s and being
shocked to discover that Aristocrats in
Paris ate onions in their food like
common Hillbillies but once again the
egalitarian sensibilities of America
prevented that sort of snobbishness from
taking hold there America welcomed a lot
of immigrants from the unioning parts of
Europe in the late 19th century and they
helped normalize both eating and growing
the vegetable which is objectively very
delicious one popular onion dish that
wound up catching on with middle class
America was onion soup the French like
to take credit for inventing this but
it's not exactly the most radical dish
in the world and a lot of other
nationalities have their version of it
too Flash Forward to World War II in
order to make rations for the fighting
Men last longer new technologies of food
dehydration were developed and after the
war that same technology was put to
commercial use in the form of selling
dehydrated foods to the status conscious
Housewives of America who were eager to
buy up anything that purported to be
convenient and modern the one thing that
really took off was dehydrated soups and
and in 1952 the lipin corporation
started selling packets of dehydrated
onion soup an American staple reinvented
for the nuclear age so barbecue is
actually a very old American tradition
and one that has changed less over the
centuries than you might expect the word
comes from the tyo Indians of the
Caribbean and means rack for smoking
meat early European colonizers in the
Americas were fascinated with the ways
that Aboriginal peoples cooked meat
outdoors with fire and racks and eagerly
tried to copy them making barbecue one
of the earliest examples of either the
Great American Melting Pot or indigenous
cultural appropriation depending on how
you're feeling but yes from practically
the earliest days Americans were having
big barbecue parties cooking conspicuous
quantities of beef and pork and chicken
on open Flames I mean George Washington
went to barbecues much like onions and
potatoes barbecues were one of the great
equalizers of Americans of all social
standings with one notable exception as
wealthy Americans particularly in the
South outsourced more of their chores
like cooking to their slaves tending to
the barbecue became increasingly
associated with blacks who in turn added
their own unique spin to it having
mastered it in captivity
African-Americans became a dominant
force in American barbecue culture after
emancipation with barbecue restaurants
becoming a popular business for free
blacks looking to gain economic
self-sufficiency in the post Civil War
era after the second world war however
Americans started going to barbecue
parties and barbecue restaurants less
and less and started barbecuing at home
more and more owning your very own
miniature charcoal or propane powered
barbecue or better yet a stone Barbecue
Pit in the backyard became one of many
status symbols of prosperity and comfort
among the post-war American middle class
this fine book on the history of
barbecue refers to the years between
1945 and 1965 as the Golden Age of the
American barbecue a time when you would
have been considered a bit of a weirdo
or maybe a communist if you weren't
barbecuing all the time any Zoomers in
the audience may be delighted to learn
that this is where the cliche of the
barbecue man as an icon of unambitious
middle class sensibilities comes from
much like their little barbecues
themselves the meats that Americans were
barbecuing in the Golden Age tended to
be pre-fabricated and machine made with
Factory processed hamburger patties and
hot dogs taking the place of traditional
ribs and steaks and just so families
wouldn't have to go through all the
hassle of whipping up their own
seasonings or glazes for the meats
Supermarket soon began selling
ready-made barbecue sauce sauces like
this one by the craft Food corporation
which has since risen to become the most
popular barbecue sauce in America it is
a mildly Tangy concoction of tomatoes
and molasses sort of loosely based on a
type of sauce that had been popular with
some barbecuers in the South only with a
lot more sugar I know that to this day a
lot of the real hardcore barbecue
restaurant tours have nothing but
contempt for Supermarket barbecue sauce
which they view about the same way that
Mexicans view Taco Bell
by the 1970s your average American was
eating 4 lb of potato chips a year with
potato chips counting for 50% of All
American snack foods at least according
to this 1975 press release from the
American potato chip Institute but
delicious though they might be there are
only so many salty potato discs you can
choke down before you start to get bored
so what did the ever Innovative American
people do to make their chip eating
experience more exciting why dip them in
something of course like barbecue sauce
that stuff goes with anything others
were more creative shortly after that
lipin onion soup mix was invented The
Californians started a craze of mixing
onion soup mix with sour cream to create
a delightful new sauce that was perfect
for dipping chips in some people said it
was like biting into a delicious baked
potato with sour cream and chopped up
onions one of the most beloved of
America's many iconic potato based
dishes the lipin people certainly got
big dollar signs in their eyes when they
heard about this and began actively
pushing the idea that you could buy
their soup and make California dip in
all of their advertisements when you
read about the history of this they
often make a big deal of the fact that
lipon sponsored a very popular TV show
in the 1950s called Talon Scouts and the
host of that show often played up the
California dip angle as one of the great
selling points of why you would want to
buy the dehydrated soup even if you
weren't a big soup guy but while
Americans can be a very entrepreneurial
people they can also be a tad lazy
surely there has to be a more convenient
way to get sauces on our chips they
cried and the corporations heard those
cries in 1958 during the height of the
middle class barbecue craze lays
unveiled barbecue sauce flavored chips
and they became a huge smash hit in the
early 1970s lays followed up with sour
cream and onion flavored chips take that
lipin so vinegar is basically just
alcohol that has gone bad in fact the
English word vinegar is just an
anglicization of the French term vinagar
or sour wine it refers to how when
alcohol is exposed to oxygen for a
prolonged period of time it transforms
into a kind of sour acid that being the
case vinegar is one of the oldest and
most universal food stuffs on Earth
present in some form in basically any
culture that has ever had liquor in a
time before spices and sugar were widely
available vinegar was often used to give
food a bit more flavor like many early
condiments it was also a popular way to
mask the often disgusting Taste of old
timey food our old Pals the English who
were too good for onions used a vinegar
made from malt ale as one of their
favorite seasonings it was particularly
popular as a topping for deep fried fish
and french fries which became a
ubiquitous staple of the British diet in
the 19th century depending on who you
listen to dosing this kind of heavily
fried food and vinegar either covers up
or accentuates the greasy flavor so
British immigration to the United States
greatly declined in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries but well into the
postwar era there were still thousands
of Brits coming every year but the big
thing that changed was that this later
wave of British immigrants more
consciously thought of themselves as
exotic foreigners than the generations
prior because obviously after about the
first century or so of Independence
Britain and the United States had
experienced significant cultural
deviation from each other including in
the realm of food so this was when you
started to see the rise of the British
pub as one more style of ethnic
restaurant in America's Multicultural
milu offering Americans a taste of the
many foods that had Arisen in the
motherland since the nasty business of
1776 including fish and chips and
vinegar the thinking is that the
popularity of fish and chips in post-war
America and the association of vinegar
with salted potato products primed
Americans to eagerly Embrace what would
become the third and final Great
American chip flavor salt and vinegar
which was introduced not by lays but the
much smaller Tacoma based chip company n
in the early '70s salt and vinegar was
actually originally a British chip
flavor but the N people thought that
Americans might go for it given the
popularity of British pub food in the
50s and 60s as you can see from their
early chip bag design they really leaned
hard into the whole British angle at
first British pub food is still popular
in America and fish and chips in
particular has become a dish that you
can now Buy in basically every American
middle class chain restaurant from Red
Lobster to Cheesecake Factory but what's
fascinating is how the stylized
simulacra of salt and vinegar chips has
proven more popular with Americans in
the long term than the British practice
of actually putting vinegar on the
french fries that inspired the flavor in
the first place it is actually one of
the great paradoxes of American British
cultural relations that so many
Americans these days would regard
putting vinegar on their fries as
something very strange and foreign even
as they now wolf down more salt and
vinegar chips than anywhere else on
Earth so there you have it four distinct
flavors of chips each one containing
within them an elaborate tale of
America's cultural Evolution as a
vibrant independent nation if you are
from a non-american nation or have
merely spent some time in one I would be
curious to hear you share your insights
into the potato chip flavor Cannon of
another country in the comments below
and I will see you all next week [Music]
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