I saw these in the store and thought these would be cool to try. So, I stuck them in my cupboard for safekeeping yet whenever I opened it to find something to eat, I always passed these by thinking I wasn’t in the mood for them. I mean, come on, ketchup and fries chips? I wasn’t ready for that yet.

So one day I sucked it up and decided to open up the bag and finally try these out… before they ended up expiring in my cupboard.

When I first opened the bag, there was an overwhelming smell of ketchup. I like ketchup just as much as the next person, but this didn’t make me want to try these chips any faster.

As for the look, they kind of look like flat french fries with a reddish-orange tint to them. I seriously think I was dreading putting one of these things in my mouth. I held it up to my nose and was again blown away by the strong smell of ketchup.
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You may wonder why I keep buying cookies at Whole Foods, given my past experience. Which is at best indifferent (think Crummy Brothers Chocolate Chip Cookies) and at worst, infuriating (Late July, I’m looking at you).

The fact is that I live basically right across the street from a Whole Foods. Whereas the Safeway is five blocks away. And given the total lack of meal planning in my household I am in the Whole Foods most days of the week. And given that I crave a snack every day of the week… well, you see the inevitable result.

I am determined, therefore, to find something that will work to fulfill my chocolate-chip cravings without walking all the way to another supermarket. My chocolate-chip craving is usually looking for either a completely homemade cookie, or for Chips Ahoy, which is the brand I have been eating all my life. The in-store bakery has something that will do for the homemade thing. But what about that all-American craving for a cookie made in a huge factory by an enormous corporate conglomerate?
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I have had just the most difficult time getting around to writing a review of these chips. Every time I tried to take a picture of the bag, it turned out that we’d already emptied it and thrown it away. I finally got this one with a handful of chips left in it.

That’s probably all you need to know about how much I like these. As a snack reviewer, I have to resist the impulse to buy something a second time, since buying something different will mean I can write another review. It’s a tough job we’re doing for you, dear readers.

But these… they are too mysterious and wondrous not to eat again. To me, the Holy Grail of snacks would be a potato chip with no calories. These are not exactly potato chips, but they’re something mystical that’s almost better. And while they don’t have NO calories, they have about a third or half the fat of normal chips. The label says they are “popped” instead of baked or fried. They are made of potato flour, potato starch, and some rice flour, and they’re full of little bubbles. I’m not sure how they do it, and I don’t care, I just want to eat more of them.

These don’t have a strong flavor of actual potatoes, like the other Trader Joe’s Reduced Guilt chips that I tried recently. And that is OK with me. If I wanted to eat a potato, I could eat a potato. And most potato chips don’t, so that just makes them taste more like chips, I think.

Their only flaw is that they are too salty. This is kind of OK, as it stops me from eating the whole bag at once. Also, I don’t mind wiping some of the salt off with my fingers if that’s all it takes to reach perfection.

• Trader Joe’s Website

We all have guilty pleasures. Some, such as closets of Saban-canon costumes or piles of “forgotten” CDs from New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice, remain unknown to all but our inner children and blackmail-equipped friends and relatives. There’s another category of pseudo-guilty pleasure, though, and as much as we’d like to feign embarrassment about enjoyments which fall into the second group, we’re secretly quite proud of them.

For me, visiting dollar stores (or 99-Cent, or 98-Cent stores – tomato, tamahto) is a member of the latter interest-group. Maybe it’s due to my Jewishness, but I really can’t resist a bargain. Especially a decent-looking and utilitarian bargain on a household item that looks decidedly non bargain-priced. Usually my dirty little shopping “secret” does not extend to food. On my latest trip to Ye Olde 99-Cent Store, though, I was hungry – so I perused the snack aisle, in search of something cheap and edible.

The sight was incredible: surrounding the yawning chasm of an aisle, yards of shelf-space granted refuge to misplaced snacks of all stripes. Local snacks which had never managed to find their niche markets shared space with imports from around the globe. Every imaginable flavor was represented, with a trend toward the obscure (at least to the lion’s share of staid American palates). Benevolent spirit that I am, I decided to adopt four kinds of super-cheap cookies from less fortunate nations and give them a comfortable home in my stomach. Here are brief opinions on my new cross-cultural cookie friends:
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If you’re like me, consuming an energy bar is like eating a bar of lies. I don’t mean that they conceal their ingredients or exaggerate their benefits (although I’ve yet to find a bar that makes me float above the street, a la Marty McFly). What I mean is that I will never, under any circumstance, use an energy bar to:

A) run a marathon
B) power-hike along the Appalachian Trail, or
C) lift something 20 times my body weight, in homage to the noble ant

My lifestyle does not involve a Jeep. Nor does it include Timberland hiking boots, a Nalgene bottle, or a dog with a bandanna tied around its neck. Rather than utilize energy bars for their intended purposes, I use them to silence my grumbling stomach as I drive to work, or elevate my blood sugar levels during lectures I would otherwise sleep through. Truth be told, most of the time I don’t even buy these products, since their marketing seems specifically designed to shame my slovenly ways.

Take Clif Bars, for example. Their wrappers feature a man scaling a mountain. Legs flailing, he clings to a granite outcropping with all this might, his battered fingernails digging into the stubborn rock before him (the man has just enough energy to hold on, thanks to that 3 oz. of granola he ingested before climbing). Ah, the average Clif bar consumer! Always spending his free time dangling above certain death!

So, if you couldn’t already tell, I’m glad that Clif has come out with a less intense snack. Because frankly, some of us just can’t handle the X-tremeness of the standard Clif Bar product.
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