Whoever invented them must have stood back, placed his hands on his hips in a slightly camp way and nodded quietly to himself - rather like Pharaoh Khufu must have done when the final pointy bit was placed on top of the great pyramid of Giza. If you think about it, transforming a slightly dank and slimy root vegetable into a golden flavour-packed disk of joy is a form of foodie alchemy. The earliest known recipe for crisps comes to us courtesy of William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle which was published in 1817. On page 104 he describes how potato slices or shavings can be fried in lard to produce a knock-out snack ideal for stuffing your face with while looking out of a window waiting for television to be invented. The humble potato chip, whilst being revolutionary, was still at the beginning of its evolutionary journey towards the apex of stack development which has now reached its zenith in the form of the pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch. With the invention of cellophane, crisps could became a mass market product and, interestingly, crisps are now packaged in plastic bags and filled with nitrogen gas to keep them fresh for longer. But it was the crazy Irish who came up with the idea of flavouring crisps so that they tasted of something else other than crisps. The Tayto crisp company hit the ground running by wheeling out both Cheese and Onion and Salt n’ Vinegar onto the post war fun-free streets of the United Kingdom in the 1950s - flicking a switch in the brains of anyone who ate them - opening the doors of perception and freaking them the heck out. Suddenly this austire black and white world was filled with colour, and sex and hope and weird flavours - which today range from the ambitious Roast Ham and Cranberry to the ambitious Firecracker Lobster. There is seemingly no end to this snack revolution, with various far-sighted visionaries taking the basic premise of cutting up a thing and then deep frying it and running with it. And now we have a profusion of pretenders to the snack crown, with Pringles locked in a fight to the death with Twiglets and Chipsticks. You know, it’s strange to think that there are children alive today who can’t recall world before Frazzles. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is…