The collapse of modern society Kylie Klein-Nixon on Lamington crisps

Want to get three million units of junk food out the door fast? Bung some classic Kiwi childhood treats into some other classic Kiwi childhood treats and cha-ching, you’re minting it.

Who can forget the year we lost our collective minds over Lewis Road Creamery and Whittaker’s chocolate milk? People were fighting in the supermarket aisles over the stuff.

Griffin’s Tip Top Goody Goody Gum Drops Squiggles, Whittaker’s K-Bar, L&P, 100s and 1000s, toffee milk. and Jelly Tip chocolate bars, Cadbury’s Pineapple Lump chocolate bars – when it comes to nostalgic fusion confectionery, we consider ourselves connoisseurs of food that has zero nutritional value, for some reason.

For goodness sake, this isn’t even the first time lamingtons have been assaulted this year: some maniac created a lamington burger, with beef patties, cheese and bacon in January.

Eventually, even the greatest boffins de cuisine will run out of reasonable things to mash together and start to get unreasonable about it.

And voila – lamington-flavoured crisps. Now, don’t let all this talk of nutrition and food give you the wrong idea.

I’m not here to give you a lecture on how you should only eat hand-picked pulses and whatever weeds you find in your own backyard. Especially not after a period when we all needed comfort foods to bring their best game.

But, jeez New Zealand, we have to draw a line somewhere, and I reckon being jauntily marketed into hate-buying gross-flavoured potato chips for a laugh is as good a place as any.

Remember how your parents used to say you couldn’t leave the dinner table until you’d finished your vegetables because somewhere in the world there was someone going hungry, and leaving good food would be disrespectful? Well, strap yourselves in, because you’re going to hear it again.

When there are more people than ever lining up at foodbanks, is it right to be manufacturing and buying foodstuffs that are more weird joke than food?

Does it speak well of a society when there are two to three aisles in most supermarkets dedicated to food that experts agree isn’t nourishing, yet there’s only one kind of carrot on offer?

Is it really hilarious fun that mountains of potatoes have been essentially ruined for a laugh? They are ruined, too.

When I was asking around about these crisps, a teacher friend told me he took a bag into school for students to try.

‘‘Out of about 60 kids I saw that day, only a few didn’t spit them out. Think about it. Teenagers spitting out chips. Cruel and unusual.’’

We live in a time when there are paper bags at the door of supermarkets that you can fill for a foodbank as you do you own shopping (which, by the way, is a brilliant thing to do, if you can), and also 157 flavours of chippies, at least one of which is basically trash.

It’s enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

kylie.klein-nixon@stuff.co.nz Kylie Klein-Nixon The things I do for you people, says Kylie Klein-Nixon, as she tries lamington crisps so you don’t have to. There’s a mental disconnect the first time you put a lamington-flavoured potato chip in your mouth. Crisps, your brain tells you, are salty, maybe a little umami. They may even be tangy. But they are not, in any just or right world, chocolate flavoured. Not if by ‘‘chocolate’’ you mean the idea of chocolate as interpreted by an alien who has never eaten any, but has had it described to them by a particularly verbose 4-year-old, which is what these lamington-flavoured nightmares taste like. But I digress. You put the crisp in your mouth and your mouth is full of mushy, chocolate-y potato. Just as you’re coming to terms with that, the ‘‘coconut’’ hits. Try not to gag. I mean, you will definitely gag, but try not to. The things I do for you people. Doing good work over at The Spinoff with her meticulous countdown of New Zealand’s best crisps last year, Madeleine Chapman was on to something when she said novelty flavours should ‘‘get directly in the bin’’. And she didn’t reckon on lamington-flavoured crisps, a concept so bizarre, so indicative of the ‘‘last days of Rome’’ vibe that 2020 has brought us, the only way I can stomach them (excuse the pun), is to have an existential meltdown and eat an entire bag of them. Smiths unleashed this unholy junk food chimera on the Australian market in January, as part of a collection of classic Aussie flavours. They were marketed here, along with paua and lemon, and cheese toastie flavours, by Bluebird, as a quintessentially Kiwi flavour. First of all, the ruddy cheek of them. What’s next, uniquely Australian pavlova-flavoured Twisties? Second, if there was ever a year when lamingtonflavoured crisps would fit in, it’s this one, right? They are limited edition, which is the best thing I can say about a product that tastes exactly how I imagine eating a coconut-scented candle would: your nose says ‘‘balmy nights in the tropics’’, your mouth says ‘‘expel this before it hits any major organs’’. In a world where food conglomerates battle tooth and claw over ‘‘share of stomach’’, and quake in their boots over our shrinking appetites for junk, novelty has become king. It was only a matter of time before this whole nostalgia mash-up thing got out of hand. As a nation, we are highly susceptible to the idea.

True lamingtons, as they were intended.