Afternoon Snack

This afternoon I had the sudden urge to get a bag of chips or something from the gedunk machines in the cafeteria. I usually don’t need a snack, but today for some reason I just had to have something. This unnatural craving must have come from some leftover subliminal suggestion implanted during my watching of Super Bowl commercials.

Mixed in between the three soft drink machines, the coffee machine, the change machine and a sandwich machine are two snack machines filled with a selection of salty or sweet or salty/sweet choices. Even though the 2 machines have a nearly identical mix of products, before choosing an item you have to look over every item in each machine before buying something. Almost everything is a national brand, but there are usually a couple of regional selections. Today, if I wanted (and I didn’t) I could have had a bag of Danny’s Pork Bits, AKA pork rinds, AKA the skin of a pig with a layer of fat still attached that has been deep fried to a crunchy consistency. The nutritional information proudly displayed on the front said that a serving of this snack would have 7.5 grams of fat and 70 calories.

I opted for something I thought might be a healtier, a 1-1/2 ounce bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Chive Potato Chips cooked in sunflower oil and advertising no trans fats. As I sat at my desk enjoying my chips, I read the back panel’s nutrition label and discovered that one serving of these chips had 15 grams of total fat and 240 calories. Wait a minute, how could this bag of chips have twice the fat and 3 times the calories of a larger 2oz bag of pork rinds (which are essentially fat fried in fat?)

I went back over to the machine and re-read the pork skin’s nutrition label again. Yep, 7.5 fat and 70 calories. Oh, here it is, serving size 1/2 oz, servings per bag 4, so if you ate the whole bag yourself, not sharing with 3 of your buddies as expected, you’d get 30 grams of fat and 280 calories.