Crunch (eBook)

Arlington Business Park, like business parks anywhere, is close to a roaring main road. In this case, it is barely half a mile from Junction 12 of the M4 in West Berkshire, eleven motorway chunks from London.

Sitting at the edge of Theale parish, flung off a big roundabout, Arlington Business Park is also close to something vanished – a seventeenth-century stagecoach route that once paused at coaching inns in the village for hay, brown ale and dim meaty dinners.1 Travellers may also have faced ladles of soupy cabbage, but probably not potatoes. Potatoes would take a few more generations for us to eat them unthinkingly like bread, and inevitably, to take them more or less for granted.

In a building of glass and chrome that stares at an artificial lake, Arlington was for a long time the headquarters address of Walkers Snack Food Limited, staffed by hundreds of sales and admin personnel in a blunt corporate appendix to village life. Recently, Walkers HQ left and moved east – to a very similar building in Green Park Business Park outside Reading, a nudge further along the M4.

Walkers began just after the Second World War in Leicester, to the north, and for its first few decades it was a local business, rarely crossing the unwritten border to the South of England, which itself is the unmarked gateway to global trade. Today, Walkers is a national brand name, in control of one of the biggest crisp factories in the world.2 And its Southern offices, in the money belt that cinches around London, mean Walkers can now make an agricultural sign of the cross from its strategic crisp zones in the UK, touching seed-potato supplier farms in Scotland, tracing down to the Green Park desk jobs, over and up to Coventry, where the brand’s owner PepsiCo makes many of its snacks and sugary drinks, and back across to the bursting-with-crisps heart, the main prideful Leicester factory, near some of the best crisping-potato farmers in the country.

I know all this. Except whenever I open a bag of Walkers, I know absolutely nothing of this. I do not stop to check the best before date, which Walkers swears is always a Saturday,3 since its factory production week starts on Sundays, and all crisps made that week take the same ‘best before end’ stamp. (Crisps generally last about three months: longer if they’re made from preserved potato flakes or double sealed in tins.) I forget about the potato purchasers, trend forecasters, potato-transport bulkers, waste compactors, factory machinery, potato breeders and flavour makers. Phones in offices do not ring about potato pricing, and no one has ever sent an email about prawn cocktail. I ignore it all.

When the crisp bag opens, with its short exhalation of cushioning air, it is the last time that the potatoes inside see daylight. I do not dwell on how they reached me from the darkness underground, or how they’ve come to taste convincingly like faraway things such as red Thai chillies. I do not measure the distance between myself and the factory door. I only know how close the crisp is to my eating.

However, since this book seeks the full crisp experience – the abstract parts as much as the edible ones – I have tried not to look away from the things that might otherwise be blanks. And to begin this unblindfolding, there’s one detail I have learned that I always think about when I eat a bag of crisps, which is the crisp makers’ rule about golf courses.

At least one large manufacturer of crisps in the United Kingdom, setting terms via its potato merchants, will not accept spuds grown within half a kilometre of a golf course. The same five hundred-metre rule applies to open countryside where golfers are thought to be working on their rough shots. Fields close by are crisping-potato no-go territory.

The reason for the rule relates to common carrion crows, which are not only gifted scavengers but also open-minded enough to pick up almost anything, including stray golf balls. Once their interest has worn off, the crows then drop the balls at will. For potato farmers, this creates a risk.

I spot these crows every morning on my way into the local woodland – a mob of them in summer, one or two in winter – wings tucked on the fingerposts and the bins, poised to fly down for festering treasure. They’ve become my unexpected augurs of all crisps.

All sorts of rogue items find their way into potato fields: pheasant eggs, which are also spud-like to the unfocused eye, tree branches, stones, acorns and shards of glass. The farmers who supply crisping potatoes in such prodigious quantities – to make enough for the roughly 186,000 tonnes of crisps sold annually in the UK – have to be vigilant of every one of these field hazards,4 as do the crispers.

After arriving at the typical crisp factory, potato loads are trundled into the hangar on a belt to be checked for potato impersonators. A golf ball spotted among the raw crisp material stops everything. The whole batch will be rejected, and the farmer (or their insurer) will foot the bill for lost crisps.

In the case of a ‘crisp scare’ that made Central Television news in the summer of 1989,5 a ‘saboteur’ was seemingly at work within Smith’s crisps factory in Lincoln, contaminating packets with shards of car-windscreen glass, broken curtain rings and pieces of wood. Lincolnshire Police launched an investigation and production was halted altogether as the nationwide inventory of Smith’s was recalled for safety. One Smith’s worker, interviewed by Central Television, said he hoped the ‘culprit’ would be found and jailed. The boss of Smith’s at the time vowed to install factory-floor cameras. (Theoretically, although it’s unlikely, the culprit could have been a crow.)

Crisps have to be tightly processed, because the way in which they are made is a three-minute opera of surreal industrial transformation. Skins are peeled with special sandpaper, flavour rains in curtains, crisps churn in giant drums. The oil is continually frying, and flammable, and nothing is left to chance, not least because more than a handful of crisp factories have accidentally burned down.

The golf course edict is faithful to this reality. It recognises the arcane requirements of a product that for all the world looks like an obvious and simple idea, reproducible ad infinitum. Potatoes: grown, sliced, fried. Grown, sliced, fried.

What could be less exhaustible, the thinking goes, than the dumbly reproductive potato, the first thing in The Martian that Matt Damon tried, with success, to grow on Mars using his own human waste as fertiliser? (Even though NASA itself has enthused about Martian soil simulants, Red Planet crisps might not be possible outside of Hollywood. There are toxins that would require heavy soil treatment,6 and low light exposure at Mars’s position in the solar system would make potatoes unhappy.)

Earthbound formulas for potato success are just as finicky, and delicately inconstant, depending on the odds of the sun (not too much) and the rain (just enough), the soil (beware pests) and the dramatic ingenuity of the natural world (see the crows). One potato farmer told me he checks the weather on his phone all day ‘like the horoscopes’ until he finds a forecast that puts his nerves at ease.

Humans, of course, keep complicating matters. The war in Ukraine has limited the supply of sunflower oil, forcing a switch in some places to frying crisps in rapeseed, canola or safflower alternatives. The fierce droughts of changing climates have also left manufacturers with the deeper threat of native potato tonnage deficit.

This kind of problem is existential if you’re a Great British crisp brand. For example, is it a sin to bulk out your supply with potatoes shipped in from Europe or Egypt? How many potato slices need to be from British soil? Back-of-packet boasts about British provenance certainly wouldn’t be possible in the same way.

The supply of spuds is also doubly fragile, since the potatoes themselves can’t just be any old potatoes. For crisps, they must be low-sugar, starchier, and smaller, rounder spuds than those grown for fresh supermarket bags or chipping machines, a shape that slices neatly into doubloons.

To achieve this, crisping potatoes are carefully and secretively bred by plant geneticists in laboratories, time-consuming work that is then patented like any other part of a brand. Open-market varieties, which crisp manufacturers use more sparingly, have characterful names like bookies’ favourites – Rooster, Hermes, Atlantic, Record (a 1970s crisping favourite) and ‘the ladies’ – Lady Rosetta and Lady Claire, to name a few.

Golden Wonder is perhaps the most famous of this group, bred in early twentieth-century Scotland by Arbroath farmer John Brown when potato ‘crossing’ was becoming a fashionable pursuit. Golden Wonder, which Brown exhibited at the Smithfield Show in London in 1904,7 became famous because of its Christmas dinner-worthy quality, dry and firm, happy to be crisped or boiled or roasted. The Scottish crisp...