Sharpening the Thin Slicing Skills

The other day, I was eating Tostitos Hint of Lime tortilla chips--the ones covered with lime flavored salt. As a digression, when I was in middle school, some of my Mexican classmates brought in packets of lime flavored salt that became all the rage. This was the mid 90's, when super sour Japanese candy was the coolest thing in our middle school. The Asian kids, budding little entrepreneurs, would buy the candy at the Japanese market and make a profit selling it to kids who had no idea that there were other ethnic markets around. The lime salt was something that you would slowly eat, or eat all at once to experience the extreme sour taste that kids at my school were obsessed with. Later, the practice of seeing who could withstand the sourest candy and salt (in some cases, pure citric acid crystals) turned into seeing who was brave/stupid enough to snort the crystals. Rest assured, no one could snort a whole packet of lime salt, and those who snorted too much exhibited such signs of agony that the practice was soon abandoned all together.

Back to the Tostitos. There is a thin layer of lime salt coating each chip. As you eat it, a progression of tastes and textures ensues. Sweet, sour, salty, crunchy, corny, mushy. The Sweet, sour and salty tastes peak shortly after the crunch and before the chip is chewed into mush, and mixes tasting like...

...something unexpected from my childhood that I could not put my finger on. I tried chip after chip, closing my eyes and concentrating on the taste and texture. The memory would flash in and out so quickly, I couldn't make out its form or any details. The only thing I had to go on was a fleeting, faded impression.

When I was five, we often had food-based projects that we worked on together. Making stone soup and gluing beans and pasta on to construction paper come to mind. My favorite activity involved making cereal into necklaces. I brought home my colorful necklace to show my parents my work for the day, and they admired it I'm sure. They told me that, although I was not allowed to eat sugar-loaded kids cereals (once, I got a box of Mr. T's breakfast cereal as a kid and almost died of happiness. Mr T. on the box + peanut butter crunchiness make for a kickass cereal IMHO) I could eat my necklace.

I chewed off the colorful loops and enjoyed this rare treat, to the point where I still remember the taste of the thin cotton string that had been threaded through them. This was the cereal with Toucan Sam that in the slimmest of moments when eating a Tostitos Hint of Lime chip had burst forth from the dusty cobwebbed recesses of my childhood, but only after about 20 chips eaten in quick succession.

It sounds ridiculous, but I maintain that there is a split second when you eat a Tostitos Hint of Lime chip, that it tastes almost exactly like Froot Loops. Try it--it may just blow your mind...