Potato Chips

From the Web

Who doesn’t like those crunchy, salty, fried snacks?

It is modern man’s favourite snack to tide one over until a proper meal can be had and is easily available in incredible variety on supermarket shelves and kiosks. Kids in particular love them too.

When we look at the ingredients of an average pack of crisps, at first nothing seems alarming: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil, Salt, Seasonings, and Flavour Enhancers.

Yet what is hidden among those few words is worthwhile knowing:
The vegetable oil is in most cases hydrogenated oil (aka trans fats) and man-made. It is cost efficient and harmful to your health. Also often used is a combination of corn, soybean, palm, sunflower and canola oil. All of them are refined oils and we all should have heard what is happening to corn and canola these days (think GMO). And the flavour enhancers? More often than not they consist of monosodium glutamate with most likely also disodium inosiante and disodium guanylate thrown in. Don’t know what they are? Salty chemical food additives that set off adverse reactions in the body and mess with your brain.

There are some expensive brands around that use for example avocado oil and do not add chemical salt; they are of course more expensive but if you are salivating by the mere thought of crunching down on some chips, they are an option. However, I would hold off on the one’s made with olive oil – because when olive oil gets overheated it is no longer healthy…

On the internet you can read pros and cons about everything stated above. It is a huge market and the stake holders (the International Food Corporations) are very protective of their denaturalised food which they have been peddling for over 30 years.

Here’s how factory potato chips are made. It takes a mere 15 minutes for the raw potato to be transformed into chips. 1 potato yields about 36 chips, very thinly sliced. It is an amazing machine that peels 12,000 pounds of potatoes per hour.

If you want to eat some really yummy chips from time to time – here’s a recipe to make them yourself, with your choice of oil, salt and spices.

More about MSG
More about Canola Oil

Bhagawati

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