This product exemplifies the fraud perpetrated upon American consumers, with those consumers as willing participants, by the food industry. The name is cute; the graphic design is great; the theory (backed by an ideology of health by avoiding evils) is impeccable: gluten-free without having to say so, non-GMO, low-fat, low-salt and low-sugar. In other words, they have made junk food without the evil-ness of junk food.

Except for one problem: they taste — almost literally — like heat-pressed cardboard, with undertones of old garage dust. To say they are tasteless is not so in the same way that tap water is not tasteless; the taste of Beanitos, however, resembles nothing like a chip, which is not a bad thing, but nothing like good, which is a terrible thing. Here we see the fallacy of trying to make good by removing evil alone; one must actively intend to do good, and remove evil to that end, but without the corresponding filling-of-the-void with good, what is left is not evil but entropy. An ashen heat-death of absent flavor and questionable nutrition, clearly fleeing from our fears of high-fat high-salt high-sugar McDonald’s style junk food, but not making it to the other extreme of Real Food. Instead, you have the junk food with the evils removed and the remainder is a jumble of mediocrities.

Original Black Bean With Sea Salt chips are great for any gathering that is essentially political. That is, if you are swimming in acquaintances who are obsessed with veganism, gluten, cholesterol, salt and other scapegoats for their poor health — which can be cured by moving to the suburbs and getting some exercise, for the most part, unless they are outright doomed by bad genetics — these Beanitos chips are a good compromise that will not offend anyone. They will not make them enjoy the experience, but many people judge life based on ideology and not enjoyment or beauty or truth or any other of those old-fashioned things, and so if your audience is suitably neurotic, they will claim to like these. But beware: they are not good, nor flavorful, nor really useful as chips. We tried feeding them to grackels and they gave us the finger (feather?) and flew away.

Tags: beanitos, chips, christianity, junk food