Pommes

The pommes maxims, pommes boulangère, pommes dauphinoise, pommes purée — all the classics, all the classics — are classics for a reason. But today it’s not about them. It’s about a humble potato creation that takes things from the ordinary to the sublime.

Free markets and democratic processes have a self-correcting mechanism built in — inefficiency gets replaced by efficiency; the suboptimal gets outcompeted by something better. Across evolution, markets, and technology, inefficient systems are gradually substituted by more efficient ones, all slowly converging toward smarter design.

And yet one glaring failure has slipped through the cracks, hiding in plain sight like a dormant virus: bargain-basement kettle-cooked chips.

They are objectively hazardous. If one of those jagged shards goes vertical mid-bite, it can absolutely obliterate the roof of your mouth — a full-on gum-gashing event. I don’t understand why we choose them over perfectly engineered, soft chips that dissolve harmlessly and practically surrender in the mouth. The risk-reward profile is just not good.

Somewhere along the way, natural selection gave up… and now we’re left with rock-hard, mouth-shattering, gum-destroying, tongue-slashing chips.