About the Chipster Diaries

Welcome to the Chipster Diaries, a blog I set up to rant and rave and generally evaluate the varieties of salty snacks on the junk food aisle that we’re all guiltily curious to try but afraid to purchase for fear of disappointment.  Hopefully, with the insights contained herein, you will be prepared to discern the boringly conventional from the brilliantly innovative, and even be made aware of the more bizarre options available to satisfy those of more “alternative” proclivities.



The author sheepishly consuming mustard
chips in Paris during a house party.

 In all seriousness, I attempt to thoroughly analyze all of the products I review here and summarize both their strong and weak points, and furthermore I have reviews for products both in the United States and France.  Yes, I know, whenever you think of French cuisine, you think of chips too!  Very cliché, I admit, but now you can be fully informed as to the availability of such bizarre continental delicacies as Roast-Chicken flavored fries in a bag and Goat Cheese Cheetos.  You may want to check out my first post, if you haven't already- otherwise, onwards to the questions!

Who would perpetrate such a thing?  The Chipster Diaries is the creation of a certain Sebastien Roblin.  I’ve naturally arrived at writing junk food criticism after a career involving work in refugee resettlement, a stint as an English teacher in El Salvador, a master’s degree in conflict resolution, a year as a university library shelf stacker, a 4^th and 5^th grade public school teacher, and an escapade as a political advertising mercenary.  I’m currently living in Paris after years lurking in the shadowy underworld of Washington DC, and is currently trying to persudade people that they need their resumes translated into English.  I'm far more of a geek than a hipster, though my wife tries to make me dress like one.

In fact, I would probably be writing lengthy essays on Central African balance of power politics and its effect on the peace keeping mission in Congo, military history (such as the odd fact that generally the winning side during World War II had an inferior tanks), meditations on the optimized design of Dungeons & Dragons games, and ruminations on the long term implications of the Horuse Heresy on the Imperium, 40,000 years into the future.  But I write reviews of chips, because I have found a topic simple enough that my endless torrent of words can be brought down to a manageable size.



Could even Elminster resist the
insanity inducing powers of the Chaos
Gods?  Only a few know the answer...



Pay no attention to those that whisper I was instrumental in orchestrating the intrepid expedition that laid siege to the Netherese citadel of Tal Morkanis in the depths of the Anauroch desert, or that I was peripherally involved in the encroachment of the Chaos gods of the Old World into Faerun.  I can neither confirm nor deny my participation in these wildly exaggerated episodes, and I suggest you pay them no heed.

How did I fall so far from grace as to descend to writing junk food reviews?  Well, while I did expound a bit on this in my origin story in my first post, I will reiterate that I was raised by a very nutritious family that strictly forbade junk food and cooked beautiful continental meals every evening of the weak. 

They cannot be held the slightest bit responsible for the fact that I ended up so enamored with chips, or more specifically, the awesome flavors on chips.  Regular salty potato chips are nice and all, but not something I’d go out of way to eat- but give me barbecue flavored chips¸ cheese flavored chips, sour cream & onion, or better yet exotic stuff like spicy Thai and peanut flavored chips, and I just want to try more and more.

So in between my wildly variegated employment situations, I have consistently been trying to seek out new kinds of flavors and carefully evaluating the merits, or sometimes appalling demerits, of various products, and felt it was a shame that I could not share those profound insights with the rest of the world.  Naturally, over time, I came to think that I actually should write them down and put them on a blog, something I began doing in the spring of 2010.  That is, I began writing them down, but the whole getting-around-to-setting-up-a-blog things took a little longer.  Like, a year longer...hey, it's faster then healthcare reform (3 more years to go...)  Speaking of which...

Aren’t chips terribly unhealthy?  Do you have trouble shifting your bloated corpulent mass quickly enough to roll over to the kitchen for your next helping of lipid-soaked wafers of ultra-dense carbohydrates coated with cancerous chemical concotions?

Well, there’s no denying it, chips are unhealthy and have zero nutritional value.  I won't even try to pretend otherwise.  Even the healthier kinds of chips (Sun chips or baked chips) basically are only a little unhealthy, instead of a lot unhealthy.

The author and Schwarzenneger in the only remaining
production photo from Pumping Iron 2.

That said, I believe it’s perfectly possible to eat them fairly regularly without gaining a lot of weight as long as: 1) you don’t binge on them and stick to eating no more than a serving per day 2) you similarly take care not to overdose on other unhealthy foods.  A large bag of chips should usually last a week, and so forth, (in France it's even easier, because the bags are so damn small (the average sized bag is 135 grams, or only 5 ounces!)  Anyway, I’ve managed to stay reasonably fit.  While I unfortunately can’t show you (for legal reasons) the cut footage of me with Schwarzenegger in the cancelled Pumping Iron 2: Max Pumpage (and trust me, it’s as hot as it sounds), you'll have to accept my word that my dream of offering my belly as a trampoline to a host of nubile attendants is not likely to be realized any time soon.

So what do you have here that’s interesting?  Well, for the time being I will be posting new chip reviews at least twice a week for a while, which you are free to peruse for your own pleasure.  I have dozens of reviews already written over the last year, and I’m just awaiting the time to properly format and revise them, so there should be plenty of content on products from the United States, as well as new reviews coming in for French snacks.  As soon as I have enough reviews, I will include an index pages so that you can search chips according to genre (cheese flavored/Doritos brand/European chips, etc.)  Finally, you can always check out the Scoring Guide to laugh at my over detailed description of the precise significant of 21/2 stars and so forth.  So, amuse yourselves above all, make fun of my tangential writing style, and gather ideas for what to get before that next big house party!