Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip

8. A Few of Our Favorite Things:Fats, Carbs, and Calories

8 A Few of Our Favorite Things Fats, Carbs, and Calories Now let me tell you something. Fat-free potato chips are just about like picking up a piece of cardboard—that brown craft paper—and trying to eat that. We tried it, and the public did not accept it. Mose Mesre, Conn’s Potato Chip Company, Zanesville, Ohio The craze on carbohydrates is worse now than ever. Having said that, there are people who need a bag of potato chips now and then. For those people, we exist. Glenn Weber, King’s Potato Chips, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania If you look at the nutrition labeling on the backs of most of today’s potato chip bags—it doesn’t matter if the chips are kettle cooked, cooked in lard, or whatever—you will not find much variation in the total calories provided by different types of chips. They tend to have 150 to 160 total calories per one-ounce serving, and “calories from fat” are usually rated at 80 or 90. Sifting through the fifty-some bags in my contemporary chip bag 118 A Few of Our Favorite Things 119  collection, I found that Snyder’s of Hanover had the lowest calorie count, 140, with 60 calories from fat. The highest were Ballreich, which uses partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and Zerbe’s, a tiny Lancaster County lard chipper, tied at 170 total calories, 110 from fat. Surprisingly, most other lard chippers were in the middle or even the low end of the total calorie range. But it’s not so much the total fat that counts. What seems to matter in dietary health is the type of fat. Phats of the Land The names and types of fats—saturated fats, unsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, hydrogenation, trans fats—pose an endless continuum of confusion for the consumer. An example is the relative health rankings of butter versus margarine, which seem to trade places every ten years, depending on recent research. One thing is almost certain: although fats and oils are necessary for good nutrition, they are too abundant in the modern American diet. The technical name alone for this category of biological macromolecules— fatty acids—does not evoke a flattering or appetizing image. Saturated fats are usually—but not always—animal fats, such as lard, and tend to be solid at room temperature. These are cited as having bad effects on health because they elevate bad cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein—LDL). Unsaturated fats, more often “plant fats” from nuts and seeds, are those with one or more double bonds, thus rendering some of the individual carbon atoms in the molecule “un-saturated”— without hydrogen atoms. Unsaturated fats can be either monounsaturated (one double bond) or polyunsaturated (two or more double bonds). Fats with double bonds tend to have lower melting points; that is, vegetable oils are “melted” (liquid) at room temperature. Although more healthful for the most part, plant oils historically used in cooking were not without a downside. Through the end of the nineteenth century vegetable cooking oils were susceptible to rancidity. In chemical terms, the prevalence of double bonds made them easily oxidized, resulting in spoiling and loss of stability. “Hardening” of oils into something more solid—partial hydrogenation—was an invaluable aid to food manufacturers when introduced in 1903. Physically, the process of partial hydrogenation made vegetable oils more like animal fats, and gave them longer shelf life. In the process of partial hydrogenation, some double bonds in a fat might be removed, while one or more “cis” double bonds are formed into “trans” double bonds. Where cis fats have hydrogens on the same side of the double bond, trans fats have the hydrogens on the opposite sides, enabling them to pack together solidly—making them firmer, like lard. Although naturally present in animals that “chew the cud” and evident in butter, beef, and mutton, trans fats are otherwise rare in nature. Trans fats have the same molecular formula as the original unsaturated fat they came from, with the same numbers of atoms, but by the process of hydrogenation acquired beneficial properties not present in their unmodi fied progenitors. In addition to diminishing rancidity, hydrogenation allowed food producers to manipulate the fats’ melting point—the textures of shortenings could be optimized for blending with flours for pastries. Vegetable-based fats could thus replace lard and butter, the general thinking being that any vegetable-based spread...