One of the reasons I wanted to finally get the Pollanation piece written up is because yesterday, I purchased a bag of full-on Pollanation from the fine people at Frito-Lay. At Target, there were two flavors of what appears to be either a new line or at least a packaging change. Garden Tomato and Basil, and some kind of barbecue chip. The website shows four more. Let's rack up Pollanation Points on this product, shall we?

First, there's the color palette. The background is white, fading to a beige "table" motif in the bottom half of the bag. The banner behind the Lay's logo is, unsurprisingly, green. The "New!" bnner is a slightly lighter shade of green. The whole thing is clearly meant to evoke Whole Foodsy, hippie packaging instead of the bold, bright, flavor-appropriate backgrounds of their other chips.

Also on the front is the key Pollanation label: "Made with ALL NATURAL potatoes and seasonings". First of all, every potato product is made with "all-natural" potatoes at some point in its production. Scientists haven't invented an artificial potato, after all. What would be the point? Even the dehydrated potato flakes that become Pringles started out as all-natural potatoes. So I am unimpressed. The all-natural seasonings part is only slightly better, on account of there being some decidedly unnatural seasonings out there. Of course, the terms "all" and "natural" are unregulated and meaningless on food packaging.

On the back, we have a cutaway image of potatoes, reinforcing the idea that this product is food because it started off as food before we fucked with it. There's also a slogan: "Happiness is made with the highest quality potatoes and all natural seasonings." Which is hilariously awful. One, that's not what happiness is made of. Two, clearly, that's not what these chips are made of, because if it were, they'd be touting the fact that the chips were made with the highest quality potatoes. Instead, they imply that fact by making philosophers around the world spontaneously vomit.

But the best part, the most hilarioius bit of Pollanation on the whole thing, is a recipe for Tomato and Basil soup. The soup recipe does not include the chips. It's just a basic soup recipe whose only vague commonality with these chips is the alleged flavor. This is an awesome bit of marketing chicanery - encourage healthy, straightforward scratch cooking on the back of your bag of potato chips. Fucking shameless.

So, enough about the bag - how are the chips themselves? Depending on how much powder is on the chip, they are either oppressively salty or inoffensively tomato-esque. I don't taste basil at all, unless you count Vaguely Italian Seasoning hints from time to time as "basil". And I don't. They're just tomato sauce-flavored potato chips. Not bad enough to keep from finishing the bag, eventually, but not good enough to ever want to buy again.