1291: The Gentrification of Snack Foods

Have you noticed how it’s increasingly difficult to buy a bag of salt and vinegar crisps these days?

I don’t mean that they’re hard to find — they’re still everywhere, and still the second-best flavour of crisps (the best being, of course, prawn cocktail) but rather it’s increasingly difficult to find a bag that just says “salt and vinegar” on them.

No, these days it’s all “sea salt” and either malt, cider or, in extremely pretentious cases, balsamic vinegar. Granted, each of those does have a distinctive taste from the others, but it’s a distinction we didn’t used to make because no-one knew what the fuck balsamic vinegar was.

Crisps aren’t the only type of food that has undergone gentrification, though. We now have “fruit terrine” rather than “jelly with fruit in”; “artisan bread” rather than “crusty bread” (or, you know, “bread”); and almost everything that involves chocolate that isn’t a chocolate bar has suddenly become “Belgian chocolate” as if its Flemish origins somehow make the poor-quality chocolate sauce you get with a chocolate pudding magically better.

There’s probably some sort of deep-seated sociological reason for all this happening that marketing people have picked up on. At a guess, I’d say it’s something to do with people having aspirations towards being “middle class”, and what’s more middle class than balsamic vinegar? Slap that on your bag of crisps and you immediately no longer have crisps — which are clearly a working class food — but instead you have posh crisps or, more accurately, “nibbles”. The sort of things you pour into a bowl because eating them out of the bag is just so frightfully common.

Where does it end, though? Wagon Wheels become Alloy Rims? (with Jammy Alloy Rims being marketed as “a delicate berry jus nestled in a bed of delectably fluffy mallow, all encased in rich, smooth Belgian chocolate”) Cheestrings launch a new “Cheestrings Pro” range made out of suitably pongy blue cheeses? Cheetos complement their Pepsi flavour (yes, it totally exists — see?) with an array of flavours based on popular wines and ports?

I jest, of course. I’m not annoyed about all this; I just think it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon that appears to have been growing over the last few years in particular — or perhaps it’s been going on for a lot longer and I just never noticed. When I was a student, for example, I didn’t go looking for pretentious crap like balsamic vinegar; I bought value goods. (Actually, that’s not so bad; cheap crisps are frequently the best due to the sheer amount of flavouring crap they cover them with. Plus you’d never get Tangy Toms rebranding themselves as “Sundried Tomato Flavour Bites”.)

Anyway, I’m off to enjoy a cool glass of triple-filtered cow beverage, and perhaps a Belgian chocolate chip Snack Disc.