Following on yesterday’s collection of comely extreme sports gear, we turn now to the matter of the potato chip, another of civilization’s finest accomplishments, though not one, traditionally, associated with fitness.

Wikipedia recounts the story of an American chip magnate named Laura Scudder, who in 1926 introduced one of the great advances in chip technology: the bag. Before Ms. Scudder, chipmongers dispensed their wares from barrels or glass display cases, leading to breakage, and staleness, and thence despair. Scudder tasked her staff to create pouches from wax paper, sealed with an ordinary household iron, to allow her company’s chips to remain both fresh and intact. As it happens, we have Scudder to thank for another innovation of food packaging, too: the concept of freshness dating.

However rare it might have been, it inevitably came to pass that someone, a person of herculean restraint, was confronted with a half-consumed bag of chips that went unfinished in a single sitting. History does not record their name, or how they addressed the challenge of resealing the bag; perhaps with an iron. But by the 1930s, the world’s first chip clips had begun to appear, beautiful brass and Bakelite devices for safeguarding the freshness of their precious cargo. These exhibit a range of locking mechanisms, from the simple spring clip to the pick-resistant cylinder, reflecting a diversity of family traditions regarding sharing. Their cheerful yellow and floral motifs, no doubt sympathetic with both the wax paper bag and the potato itself, are a bracing tonic to the modern idiom marked by gaudy colors and garish foil.

Published January 31, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.