Friday, October 8, 2010

How potato chips are made


This may be a familiar subject to many, but I'd never seen a video depiction of how potato chips were made. This one has satisfied my curiosity.







What annoys me is the number of chips that can be cut from a single potato. If you look at the cost (by weight) of the raw materials, and compare it to the cost of the finished product, it's quite sickening!

Peter

4 comments:

gebiv said...

Don't confuse the cost of the initial material with the cost of making the chips. There's a lot of energy, water, and other infrastructure to pay for with each bag of chips. Not to mention, if there's no profit for the manufacturer, there's no reason to make them.

If potatoes weren't so cheap to begin with, we'd never have chips at all.

:D

Tamara Kelly said...

I agree - I think we should just eat the potato ...BUT... consider the product in so many other ways.
Your one packet of chips is a product of immense technology, power and products which have all amazingly been brought together.
Let's look at the packet. Usually plastic obtained from oil which may have been sucked from deep beneath the earth. Travelled to factory made into plastic, travelled to next factory when it is printed (the printing process in itself requires immense technology too)and then probably sent to the chip packaging factory.
The chips were grown on a farm somewhere deep in America (?), using fertilisers and insecticides which have all had their own extensive technologies involved. They were harvested with a high-tech tattie digger, placed on a truck, transported to the factory.
All the machinery in all of the involved processes all came from somewhere and cost a mint to design and build.

All this so we mere mortals can have crunchy thin sliced potatoes.

From this point of view a packet of chips looks really cheap.

Old NFO said...

I've got to agree with Tamara! (munch)

Skip said...

The biggest cost is the bag they come in.
As much as 50%.