Pitch a Chip Fit

Maybe more than most people I like spicy snack chips. Yeah a lot of humans can’t get enough ice cream , cakes or cookies, but you can keep all that sweet stuff. I need my salted triangles, flat pepper crackers, and crunchy ‘hot’chips. But just because of that fact, the people at Doritos should not take advantage of my indiscriminate spicy-liking, yet ‘chipper’ nature with their clever packaging.

Now the problem is that the Frito Lay folks have decided to start marketing bags of all kinds of weird flavored chips. Most tend to be acceptable combinations of spicy salsa flavors like Habanero n’ Cheese or Chili and Lime and they all are in excitingly colorful red bags. However, I found a flavor variety this week with Japanese written on a yellow-green bag. The name on this new mystery chip was simply, “Doritos, Mr. Dragon’s Fire Chips”.

Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds PRETTY GOOD to me! I mean “fire chips” and a DRAGON on the SAME package? You cannot get a much better representation of a hot, spicy, and salty snack chip than that. It looked like a bag of fireworks so I fell instantly in true love! The only problem is that it has been more than 25 years since I studied Japanese, so I could not remember the meaning of the Japanese writing on the package. All I knew was since it was Katakana, it HAD to be a Japanese attempt at a phonetic translation of a foreign descriptive word like “Crunchy or Jumbo” – well you get the idea.

So I get this curious green Doritos bag home and of course I have to dive right into the contents. I was on a mission to see what rare flavor treat this “dragon fire chip” had in store for me. The smell alone wafting from the open package gave it away. But once that golden chip with the unique and very green flavor dust hit my tongue, I instantly remembered what the three syllable Katakana word on the packaging said – WA-SA-BI!

Yes that nasty and brutally hot sushi mustard, Wasabi had tainted my lips and worse yet the WHOLE 12 ounces of my $4 bag of chips! What have I done to Frito Lay to deserve such treatment? I am a loyal customer, willing to risk my own health and financial security to eat their pricey, heart-stopping products. Heck I am even dumb enough to fall in love with their pretty green packaging even if the critically important main flavor ingredient is written in a foreign language.

So needless to say I was not happy and half a mind to pitch a fit AND those chips to the wind. But a cool head prevailed and I thought better of it. Whatever my daughter’s friends won’t eat, I will RECYCLE the rest as organic ‘mustardy-mulch’ around the garden. Then, not only will I truly be going GREEN, but as soon as it gets dark, our pesky raccoon moochers will be too!