Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Today’s snack food adventure into gastronomic Hades consists of pizza flavour chips with real cheese “bits” on them - a favourite amongst consumers here I presume, judging by the product’s never-ending presence on shop shelves, in comparison to its more temporary potato chip brethren like the short-lived sale of such items as the uncannily smegma-fragranced Seaweed ‘n’ Mayonnaise Prawn Crackers in which almost no thought must have gone into how potentially life-threateningly disgusting the combination of such random ingredients would be, and the disturbingly sudden departure of the delicious and much loved Roasted Corn flavour Curls which if I had a bag of right now, everything in my life would be ok and I wouldn’t need to shove this fork in my eye.

The potato chip industry in Japan moves at An Awesome And Furious rate. Its almost as if products are given about a week to bear profit before the marketing director hastily recalls everything and screams to his workers “re-invent them! And this time use more baleen!”, brandishing a huge comedy cigar. I think in terms of variety, Japan HAS to win some kind of booby prize for having the most flavours, ever, in the world, of potato chips. And not just in terms of individual flavours - Japan is bold enough to cast aside common sense and ignore complaints from health interest pressure groups by saying “ok, we have like 40 separate flavours of potato chip. By adding these together in different combinations that means, why, we have SEVEN BILLION flavours! We’ll be rich because people will buy them to put in their mouths!” which is why “Seaweed ‘n’ Mayonnaise Prawn Crackers” was a very real product that insane people could actually buy with real money.

If I was ever to draw one of those newspaper political cartoons about (the decidedly non-political subject of) the Japanese potato chip industry it would take the form of a really fricked up Escher painting where random pots and pans containing bizarre artificial flavourings such as “Spicy Fish Egg” and “Yoghurt ‘n’ Broccoli” adorn the inverted, impossible stairways whilst a single, drunken potato chip totally off his face on cheap Eastern European vodka staggers about, tripping over and falling into the containers as he walks, trying desperately to get out of the maze, the goal triumphantly labelled “THE CONSUMER MARKET”. It would be a drawing that teeters on the very border of geniusdom.

Anyway back to the pizza chips with “real cheese bits”. First of all, bravo to the manufacturers for creating a food product using some real food. I wait in dribbling anticipation of the day when all of Japan adheres to such crazy independent thinking and for example, puts some actual curry in their curry and sells meat with some meat in it, not just slices of gleaming white gristle with the occasional fibre of animal flesh running across it’s length.

Unfortunately however, the “cheese” on these chips is not reeeeally “real” cheese at all, even according to my rather forgivingly broad interpretation of what may be referred to as cheese on snack goods. No, this is more like a kind of heavily processed cheese-flavoured starch product that the working-class cheese of a post-nuclear future might be rationed from the Ministry Of Plenty to feed to their baby cheeses to make them grow up strong enough to kill a fully grown man.

Also, you have to worry about the reference material used in this product, since Japan is not a country renowned throughout the universe for its high quality pizza. In Japan the average pizza will invariably be a thin round affair with a curious combination of mayonnaise and cheese slowly congealing above a tart, ketchup-based sauce, with random items adorning the surface, seemingly taken from “Chapter 14: And Here’s What NOT To Use” from the Idiot’s Guide To Making A Pizza Real People Can Eat, such as diced potato or thick slices of hard boiled egg. This is not to say that quality pizza cannot be found in Japan - there are many places that almost seem to know what they are doing, but they tend to be either rare or expensive. In the area where I live there is only one place regarded by myself and other foreigners in the area that sells decent pizza - over 40 minutes drive from my house and clocking up over 2500-yen (£15) for a “large”, that will satisfy one person just nicely, provided they have consumed an entire herd of wildebeest only minutes beforehand.

However, I am a reasonable man. I know that even if I chomp down into an American or British brand Pizza-flavoured potato chip I can’t expect total authenticity, and instantly feel as if I am in Italy’s finest pizzeria wolfing down strange wafer-thin strips of crispy margherita - “Pizza” being a far more ambiguous flavour to recreate than something more specific like “Beef” or “Salt”. And for what these Pizza chips attempt to do, they somewhat succeed, like a 3 year old child who miraculously manages to hammer a triangle into a square-shaped hole through blind determination.

Appearance These chips look like any standard ridged chip except with an abundance of yellow and orange globules splattered on them in a cheese-bukkake fashion. Making them surprisingly appealing, but don’t tell anyone I said that. Rating 3/5

Taste / Smell CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE. Actually no, but screaming the word “CHEEESE” is remarkably therapeutic. I’m not a big fan of cheese myself, which I’ll no doubt elaborate on in future entries, and I was expecting to be smashed in the face by a wall of smell so cosmically bad I would want to gouge out my own nostrils as soon as I opened these - especially considering one of the main cheeses used is Camembert (that well known pizza-affiliated cheese) - but as far as the cheesiness of these chips goes, its much less “slap you in the face” and more like “gently waft a flannel over your nipple” - mildly irritating but not entirely bad at the same time. As for the taste - they taste a bit like pizza. Pizza with Camembert. So some bizarre pizza that the French eat whilst they sit around at le café going “Hee Hor Hee Hor” until 3pm which means the working day is over and they can all go home. Rating 3/5

Fear Factor They are chips - people WANT to eat these. Even normal people like you and me. Rating 0/5

Health Implications Not very good I’m afraid, seeing as lets face it, cheese is rancid butter, so these are in effect butter-covered bits of fried potato. Calorie and fat content well above average. Rating 1/5

Overall rating for PIZZA POTATO: 3/5

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Food Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.