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    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at The Crossroads

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    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at the Crossroads

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    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at The Crossroads

    Uploaded by

    TamarShafrir
    481 views4 pages
    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at the Crossroads

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    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at the Crossroads

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    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at the Crossroads

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    481 views4 pages

    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at The Crossroads

    Uploaded by

    TamarShafrir
    Reyner Banham - The Crisp at the Crossroads

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    The Crisp at the Crossroads ‘Among the triumphs of progressive technology that Luddites and Leavisites alike have lately been spared is the toadin-the-hole-flavoured crisp with a hole in it! Scores of, other equally nutty (literally so, in some cases) flavours for the familiar old potato crisp have been mooted lately. Don’t imagine that cheese-andonion or barbecue-bacon ex- hausts the ingenuity of the industry, now that flavours are sprinkled on as a dry powder before the crisp is cooked. ‘Not all the possibilities have got beyond idle brainstorming (blackberry-and-apple? ‘smoked salmon? how about créme de menthe?), but the story about the party that. was stoned right out the window at Redondo Beach by LSD crisps is true, apparently, ‘and one memorable week in Montreal | breakfasted (for reasons beyond human belief) on Boursin, instant coffee, and rainbow crisps. Rainbow? You bet: red, blue, green, white, natural, and all tasting like cardboard. The potato crisp is at the crossroads, and to judge by the sundry aromas arising {rom the secret kitchens of R-and-D departments, the industry can’t guess which way it will go. Whoever guesses right could make a real killing. The value of Britain’s annual Originally appeared in New Society 16, no. 406 (9 July 1970): 77. crop has doubled since 1964 and now stands around 62 million quid—crunch that! In the process, Smiths, with only 30-odd per cent of the market left, has had to concede victory to Golden Wonder, with over 45; and the old basic salted crisp has lost almost half the market to new fancy flavours. {t's been a real stirup, and it has consequences for the arts of design, because the old basic crisp they still eat down at the Rovers’ Retum, even if it is doomed else- where, was unique among the works of man in being as neatly related to its pack as was the egg to its shell. Different kind of neat, but almost as instructive to look at. For a start, itis an inherently unconformable shape. The cooking process that makes it crisp also crumples it into rigid but irregular corrugations. There is no way to make it pack closely with its neighbours, so that any quantity of crisps must also con- tain an even larger quantity of air. Bulk for bulk, as packed, crisps contain even less weight of food than comflakes, and thus give conviction to the myth that they just can't be fattening. This sense that there is no diet-busting substance in crisps is reinforced by their performance in the mouth. Apply tooth-pressure and you get deafening action; bite again and there's nothing left. t's a food that vanishes in the mouth, s0, | mean, it can't be fattening, can it? It certainly isn’t satisfying in any normal food sense; the satisfactions of crisps, over and above the sting of flavour, are audio masticatory— lots of response for little substance. The pack is analogous in its performance. Keeping the crisp crisp means keeping water-vapour away from it; and until recently the only cheap, paper-type flexible materi- als that formed effective vapour-barriers were comparatively brittle and inflexible, and thus produced a lot of crinkling sound effects whenever they were handled. What with the crisps rattling about inside, and the pack crackling and rustling outside, you got an audio signal distinctive enough to be picked up by childish ears at 200 or 300 yards. But, more than this, the traditional method of sealing off the top of the pack pro- duced a closure that could only be opened destructively and couldn't be resealed. So eating crisps was an invitation to product-sadism. You tear the pack open to get at the contents, rip it further to get at the corner-lurkers in the bottom, and then crush it Ccrackling:lat in the fist before throwing it away. I's the first and most familiar of Total- Destructo products and probably sublimates more aggression per annum than any quantity of dramaturgical catharsis. However you look at it, or listen to it, the total relationship of crisp to package is @ deafening symbiosis that comes near to perfection. And it’s the kind of perfection that not even a towering genius could have invented from scratch. The neatness of the rela- tionship has almost a vernacular quality about it, ike some survivor from a lost golden age of peasant technologies that have matured long in the wood and hand: the oar, the ‘axe, the rolling pin. But in the crisp’s case, the golden age was recent, a threshold between two ages of industrial technology—the transitional period between the grind- ing poverty that 19th century social moralists found so repugnant and the new affiu- ence that 20th century social moralists find so repugnant. In the history of rising genteelism, the potato crisp is a key piece of the technology that enabled a woman to go into a pub and still emerge a lady. By asking for “A bag of crisps, instead,” a lady could avoid having another drink without dropping out of a round; could participate in the social rituals of receiving goodies from the bar, or passing them on to others, without finding herself confronted with yet another jar of ultimate senselessness—and, above all, without incurring the accusations of airs, graces, and “going all ladi

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