Chip Review: Utz, Smokin' Sweet Kettle Classics BBQ Flavored

The tag line, as the picture shows, is "Spicy Heat with a Kiss of Sweet." "Cloyingly sweet with an almost undetectable heat amid a confusion of other flavors hardly worth the tongue's search" would, I recognize, inspire fewer first time buyers but is an altogether more honest summary. Given there won't be any second time buyers, I suppose I really can't blame them for the line they chose.

I do blame them for everything else, though. The ingredient list reads like something from a particularly ill-conceived Roman orgy: two forms of sugar, both present in greater amounts than salt; two types of cheese--yes, that's right, cheese; paprika and paprika extract for just the right paprika balance; cream and nonfat milk, presumably because they started to have regrets toward the end.... Even the bag's graphics are terrible, with that formulaic pot of what appears to be unnaturally red ketchup and the tiny little whisk lying along side it, suggesting they not only "hand cook" but even hand paint each misbegotten chip.

Look, we both know what this is about. It's about regret and loss and a hope that just won't die. "Enough," I tell myself, "It's time to move on." But then the flailing marketeers at this rudderless company find a new combination of words to wrap around "BBQ" and the mad men in the kitchen throw in whatever's at hand, and me, fool that I am, me, I'm tempted, not by a new chip but by the old one, long since gone. You pity me, I know, but you humor me, and I appreciate that.

Be the apple of my pie

Turns out I'm not only helping make a documentary about the Automat, but am even involved in a Kickstarter initiative to fund part of that effort. You'd think, given how many institutions funded parts of my education and of my dissertation work in particular, that I'd be a dab hand at asking for money, but in truth I'm tongue-tied at the prospect of doing so. I post the Kickstarter link, hand out postcards, email a few people to say Hey, isn't it funny, I'm doing this, but many, I learn later, don't pick up on my message, understated as it is. Seems I must find a way to more effectively solicit funds. And if I'm to do that then I'd best first explain why I truly think this project is worth your investment.

Know this: the film's purpose is not the dissertation's: they have the same topic but not the same thesis. The dissertation was intended to engage my fellow historians of technology and to contribute to a shared and somewhat abstruse discussion about technological systems. The documentary is trying to do something much more ambitious: to engage my fellow Americans and to contribute to a shared and universally relevant discussion about how we can best live together.

Americans used to eat together, now they eat apart, and when we eat apart we eat worse.

Horn and Hardart created a massively popular food system that, in part because of the presence of the automat machine, was communal in style. America in the 1920s was characterized by levels of income disparity equivalent to today's, but rich and poor ate together at the Automat. The 1920s also saw relatively extreme levels of anti-immigration and racist sentiment, but natives and immigrants ate together at the Automat, as did people of all races. And they continued to do so, in unprecedented numbers, for roughly the next half century. The Automat was phenomenal.

That is not how we eat today. Yes, Andy, we may all drink the same Cokes, but we don't all eat in the same restaurants, we don't shop at the same groceries, we don't even all drink the same water anymore. I'm positing--we'll see if it sticks, but at the moment I'm positing--that it was fast food that taught us to eat apart from one another: one transaction at a time, each serving individually wrapped, each tiny table and each hard seat in each low-ceilinged room intended for a single, hurried person. No one lingers in a fast food restaurant, no one connects; you refuel and get the hell out of there.

The rise of fast food as the preferred solution to the public's need for a quick, cheap meal probably reflects a general preference for separation, for personal space, and it correlates to a certain degree with the migration to the suburbs, with the adoption of the car in place of public transport, and with other examples in which American society opted for separation over connection. Are houses in the suburbs worse than apartments in the city? Is a seat behind the wheel worse than one aboard a bus? For the most part, no. But I'll tell you this, and, given a chance, I'll show you, too: a meal at a fast food restaurant is altogether worse than eating at the Automat.

Americans used to eat together, now they eat apart, and when we eat apart we eat worse. Why does this matter? Not just because it suggests we could have a better restaurant system if we had something more like the Automat, but because it points to a much bigger truth: that in general we do worse apart than we do together. Red state/blue state, income disparity, immigrant rejection, whatever the rational, whatever the reason, we need more reminders that separation costs us, as a country and as a society. How can we best live together? Not by living apart.

I don't know if, in the end and with your funding, this is what the documentary will communicate. The making of has been running for a couple of years now, and there have been many twists and turns along the way. But this is what I want it to say, and I do have some influence over that. So if you think this is worth saying, and you don't have a better way to say it, please give.