Lightly Salted Vegetable Chips

Brand: Morrison’s

Cost: £1.00

Found at: Morrison’s

Every day, I try to take a little time out to be grateful for having been born in the era of hipster nonsense. Sure, I have to put up with such silly things as puppuccinos, edible bentonite clay, and monetized Whole 30 Instagram accounts, but life is about compromise. You have to take the good with the bad and if the existence of the Fyre festival means that I also get to buy my hipster root vegetable chips in the grocery store, then have at, Billy McFarland! This girl needs some beets.

These chips are just plain great. Beets and parsnips and sweet potatoes (collectively referred to as “root fruits” by Emil) are all favorites of mine. Call me a narcissist, but if it’s mostly starch and spends its early years covered in dirt, then that’s the food for me. In fact, these chips are especially good because they manage to keep the earthy, sweet, distinctive flavors of their three-component root vegetables. They are not just colorful potato chips: the beets are beety, the parsnips parsnippity, and the sweet potatoes are out of this world. And there’s enough salt and oil to make sure that they are not too healthy: after all, I don’t eat rice cakes for the flavor, and I don’t eat chips for the health benefits.

To my mind, these chips represent the best parts of hipster-dom: a focus on novelty and innovation and a challenge to the routines of everyday life. Potato chips are great, no question, but that doesn’t mean that beet chips aren’t great, too. And sure, the beard-oiling, pipe-smoking, short-banged, tattooed masses may take it too far now and then, (okra chips, for example), but with my bag of vegetable chips in hand, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.