Rog T's Food Blog #7 - Crisps, calories and conning the public

 Ok so time for a rant. I love crisps. This dates back to when I was a kid. Crisps were the go to treat if you were hungry. Back in the day, Smiths were the big crisps company. The popular flavours were cheese and onion and salt and vinegar. Every so often they'd launch new varieties. I wasn't keen on roast chicken, to me, these tasted of snot. There was much excitement when tomato ketchup crisps came out. Even better when prawn cocktail crisps were  launched. Some I liked, but I was in the minority, such as Worcester sauce flavour. Some I didn't get, such as the crisps with the salt in the blue bag. Seemed a bit pointless to me. I can recall going down with my pals from next door, Ricky and Luke, and buying a bag of crisps each, different flavours, so we could share and no one miss out. As I think you can guess, I used to be really fond of crisps. 

As I grew up, my love affair waned. Smiths crisps disappeared  and Walkers took over (and needlessly mucked up the colour coding of crisps bags). For some strange reason, I never really took to these. I few years ago, I was chatting to a barman in a hostelry and we got onto the subject of crisps. I said I no longer really enjoyed them. He said "Try some of these" and handed me a bag of Burts Salt and Vinegar crisps, he said "If you don't like them you can have them foToday I found a new thing to be irked by crisps about. I'm on a diet and counting my calories. I fancied a bag of McCoys Ridge cut flame grilled crisps. I thought I'd just check the calories to make sure I was within my lunchtime allowance. The crisps come in a 65g bag. I checked the nutritional information on the packet. It gives you the calories for 30g (157kcal)  and 100g (524kcal). Irritatingly, I had set a limit of 350kcals on my snack. With salad & fruit, that would be just under 750kcal (my lunch target). Here's the embarrassing bit. As the pack was 65g, I tried to do a quick calculation in my head as to whether that was undwer the 350kcal, but I am too bad at mental arithmatic to be sure (it is 340kcal). In truth, I was irritated that they hadn't put the pack value. 

Why have two other values? The 30g is allegedly 2-3 servings. I don't know many people who share bags of crisps or save them for later. It is ridiculous. r free". They were delicious. He explained that Walkers use citric acid, for the vinegar flavour. This is very sharp and doesn't really taste of vinegar (they've started adding malic acid, but they aren't much better). Burts use acetic acid, which is real vinegar. This got me thinking, should they be allowed to call the crisps salt and vinegar, if they don't contain vinegar? This has annoyed me ever since.When I thought about it further I realised just how misleading the packaging is. If I hadn't looked carefully, I'd have assumed that a serving was the bag, not 45% of a bag. Like so much 'nutritional advice', you need to be Sherlock Holmes and have a degree in nutrition to decode it. 

Is it really too much to ask for the name of the flavour to reflect the flavour and the health  information to reflect the contents of the pack?