I Got Sucked Down A Potato Chip Rabbit Hole And Barely Made It Back

Shirley Lee
9 min readJun 5, 2022
What is the actual flavor of this bag of chips?

Everything is wrong in the world right now. There are wars, deadly viruses, disastrous extreme weathers. Fundamental rights are being seized left and right.

Things that shouldn’t happen, happen.

Yet here you are, about to watch me rant about a bag of chips I saw the other day.

Welcome, to the mystery of this bag of —

Lay’s Fromage Flavoured Chips.

The Beginning

Our friend 奇啲 Kei4di1 (KT) bought this bag of chips. She asked a question when she took it out:

“What exactly is the flavor of this bag of chips?”

She was asking Anthony Li, an honest man who is known for knowing linguistics stuff. Anthony immediately answered,

Fromage is ‘cheese’ in French. So it should be cheese-flavored.”

To which KT replied, “But there isn’t any sign of cheese on the packaging.”

I tried taking a peek at the bag of chips. Indeed, there was no sign of cheese. This picture was all there was:

Mysterious dip

“I saw the picture and fully thought that that’s a sour cream and onion dip. But after I paid for it, I looked at it, and I remembered — isn’t the Sour Cream and Onion Lay’s chip bag… green?” asked KT.

And she is correct.

Bags of common Lay’s chips sold in Hong Kong. From top to bottom, then left to right: Salt & Vinegar, Sour Cream & Onion, Barbecue and Classic. From here

“The longer I look at this bag of chips, the weirder it gets — thousands, if not millions of words are printed on the back of the packaging, and yet I understand none of them. The ingredients are listed in 9 different languages, and I couldn’t identify any single one. I was thinking maybe I could at least figure out where this pack of chips was made, but I…

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