CLARE FINNEY: The humble packet of crisps is a bite for all occasions… as demonstrated beautifully by Brad Pitt
There aren’t many foods that are as fun in the rain as they are in the sunshine. As a result, this summer has proved disappointingly short on big salads, rosé wine, pork pies, ice creams and barbecues.
Only one food, I find, is capable of transcending this divide and bringing a sense of occasion to any gathering, in any weather conditions: the humble crisp, a packet of which is equally at home on the park bench and picnic blanket as it is on the pub table, the sofa – or even the living room floor.
For wherever there are crisps, people invariably have good times. Whereas nuts and breadsticks exclude anyone with allergies, and olives can divide opinion, crisps (and dips, their best friends), simply unite us.
For me, they were an early delight. Growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, packed lunch food wasn’t just food; it was status and currency. Favours were curried and friendships forged over swapping strips of Cheesestring and pieces of Peperami, or trading a mint Club biscuit for a KP Chocolate Pot.
Every day, my friends and I sat at the same table, in the same place, and pooled our crisp packets like pirates sharing the spoils; Skips, Chipsticks, Wotsits, Quavers, Space Raiders – and pickled onion Monster Munch, my personal favourite.
‘Even shovelling a handful of crisps in his gob, he [Brad Pitt, pictured] is hands-down the best-looking man on the planet’
Clare Finney, author
Though we weren’t then au fait with the technique of splitting a crisp packet open flat, our ritual was good practice for the pubs of our futures, when chucking a couple of packets on to the centre of the table and gesturing to people to help themselves is a staple of socialising.
In fact, those school dinners were something of a dress rehearsal for adulthood, when moments with friends are almost entirely reduced to mealtimes: to coffee shop catch- ups, after-work drinks, picnics, dinner parties and barbecues. Running through all of these are crisps – combining crunch and salt, convenience and communality. Simple pleasures with textural complexity.
I remember the first crisp packet I opened communally after the Covid pandemic; pulling carefully at the back seam, worried I might have lost the knack over lockdown. When it finally peeled apart into a shiny, silver sharing platter, its golden flakes fanning out so we could tuck in hungrily, we cheered.
Though the times and places in which people might come together for food and drink are numerous and seem ever-growing, there remains something totemic about sharing a packet of crisps – despite, or perhaps even because, it is so basic.
READ MORE: He’s a snack! Brad Pitt, 59, wows viewers with his VERY ageless good looks at Wimbledon… and leaves fans tickled by ‘looking stunning’ while enjoying crisps
Honestly, I think that’s why people went so wild for Brad Pitt munching on crisps in the crowd at the Wimbledon men’s final last month. Images of the 59-year-old actor sharing a bag of Torres had social media swooning over the juxtaposition of the mundane crisp with Pitt’s godlike appearance.
‘Even shovelling a handful of crisps in his gob, he is hands-down the best-looking man on the planet,’ gushed one Twitter user.
‘So it is possible to look sexy and awesome eating crisps. Good to know,’ another agreed.
Watching Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz win, Pitt appeared to be in sync with his crisp brand choice. Torres is a Catalan brand which boasts that it only picks ‘the highest calibre potatoes, grown in the best gardens on the Iberian Peninsula, with whom we’ve been working for more than 35 years and where the altitude, climatic and geological conditions allow us to obtain a high quality raw material.’
Its range of flavours include Black Truffle, Caviar, Foie Gras Flavoured and Sparkling Wine.
Of course, a bag of Torres in the VIP seats at Wimbledon is a far cry from Walkers at the pub – and there’s nothing dignified, deified or indeed hygienic about six different hands diving into one packet of ready salted.
Nevertheless, the feeling’s the same, whether it’s Brad Pitt or Brian from Marketing. You can’t help but feel closer to people eating crisps – particularly when you’re eating with them, competing with their salt-flecked fingers for the crunchiest, knobbliest shards.
As anthropologist Martin Jones observed in his masterful book Feast, ‘the sharing of food brings people once again to the intimate interconnection between social person and biological organism’.
In other words, by opening a packet of crisps, taking a few and gesturing to our companions, we acknowledge our own humanness and that of everyone else.
This might sound an overblown way of talking about a £1.50 bag of Walkers ready salted, but it is as true of crisps as it is, I believe, of a roasted lamb shoulder and minted new Jersey potatoes. Indeed, more so, I’d argue.
‘Preserve his genes!’ Twitter was awash with excited reactions from viewers
Big win: The stars packed out the VIP seats at the All England Lawn, Tennis and Croquet Club to watch Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz triumph over Serbia’s Novak Djokovic in the Men’s Final
We do not need crisps, we simply want them. After a drink or two, they sate our desire for something salty and snackish.
Above all, there’s a gleeful complicity born of sharing something unhealthy, as my friend Lauren once observed to me over a packet of those Torres crisps flavoured with truffle.
Scrabbling around for the last scraps, we marvelled at the fact we were eating them merely because we wanted to, not because we were heartbroken or having a bad day.
So often in life, particularly the life of a woman, ‘treat’ foods need justifying to oneself and to others. Yet in the hierarchy of justifications for unhealthy eating, the best one is falling off the bandwagon together. When we share crisps with other people, we reveal not just our appetite, but our desires and susceptibility to temptation: ‘Oh, go on then,’ we say, reaching for the remaining fragments.
A few beers might make you friends with anyone for an evening – but a packet of crisps always seals the deal.
- Based on an extract from Clare Finney’s new book Hungry Heart: A Story Of Food And Love, published by Quarto.
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