But Ivan did not, to my disappointment, get abducted. We left the supermarket, got to the car and I ripped open the bag. I waited a second. Watched. Ivan still not abducted. Dammit. We each ate a chip in silence, me with my phone out, ready to text a new name for the chip to headquarters. What did it taste like?
“Anchovy. No—tartar sauce,” I said, chewing.
“Pickle?”
“Yes, there’s pickle in tartar sauce! Yes!”
“It tastes like a gas grill.”
“Tastes like a beefy pickle.” We popped more chips, searching for the words to describe the chemical intensity being wreaked upon our taste buds; we were like really trashy wine snobs: “Ah, an arrière-goût of American cheese? A petit soupçon of Wonderbread?”
With some fine-tuning, we concluded that X-13D tastes like cheeseburger. Seriously. It’s a chip that tastes like cheeseburger.
The challenge, as issued by headquarters, was to “let your mouth decide what they should be named.” My mouth thought long and hard about it, and in the end, this is really the story of how I, a mostly rational adult, ended up text-messaging the phrase “Radioactive Cheeseburger” to the phone number C-H-I-P-S.
What do I stand to win, you ask? 100 “unbelievably lucky” random winners will be selected to become Doritos “Flavor Masters.” This means they win Doritos for a year and the “privilege of tasting new secret creations.” It strikes me that this might be a whole new marketing tack—to celebrate how awesomely, completely, futuristically artificial a product is. Doritos has created a fictional universe that ultimately revolves around how truly unabashedly lab-produced their “secret creations” are. Not that anybody ever thought that there was some bonneted maiden churning up a vat of Cool Ranch sauce and rolling out stone-ground corn into little triangles. But to turn the flavor-factory artifice into a game—well, they got me and Ivan to buy a bag. Ivan? Oh my God—Ivan? He was just standing next to me a second ago! NOOOOOO!!!
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