Potato Chips

I seem to always do foreign foods or desserts or drinks and I wanted to use this post to write about something that poeople see more often…like every day. I chose to write this passion blog post on potato chips. It seems like so so many people oversee the history of such a popular snack food. I will skip what a potato chip is, since you probably already know that they are just thinly sliced potatos….

Potatoes have been one of the most popular snack foods in the world, while 1.2 billion pounds of the snack is consumed in the United States alone! So how did the first potato chip come about? His name was George Crum (yes…his last name was Crum), a chef at a resteraunt in New York. He recieved a complaint about his potato slices being too thick and soggy. George was furious about this so to teach the customer a lesson, he brought out super thin slices of potato covered in salt. Thinking the customer would hate the new dish, George thought this was the perfect way to make the customer angy. Well, they ended up being really good, and more and more people started requesting these new thinly sliced potato chips. Soon George opened his own resteraunt called “Crum’s House” serving his potato chips with every meal.

Unfortunately, as an African American, Crum was never allowed to patent his invention, so they became mass produced without giving him any credit. The first national potato chip company was Lays, started by Herman Lay in the 1920’s and picked up momentum until 1961 when Lay’s Chips merged with Frito snack company to explode the popularity of potato chips. Although other countries produced chips with many flavors, Barbecue was the first flavor to be sold in the United States by Herr’s Chips.