Poem of the Week 2024/29

Salt and Vinegar

I consumed the salt and vinegar crisps

in a single gulp.

The packet ballooned with volume

to greet me; a twin

of my stomach, but darker –

when I finished

it wasn't as empty as my stomach once had been,

my hand stretched further into it

like a glove

and came up with shards, jagged

in the depths, the world's splintered residue.

– Amit Chaudhuri

Crisps are the very descriptive British term for potato chips. Salt & vinegar is a flavor inspired by the traditional malt vinegar used on the chips (French fries) in fish & chips (so many differing potato words!). I've had salt & vinegar crisps. They're actually kind of disgusting, with a highly processed, very salty, & somewhat acrid taste. But I can understand the craving for them, for this specialized artificial bloom of flavor, this attempted recreation of a homey comfort. Perhaps that is why the hungry poet consumed rather than ate them: they are very much a consumer product, as opposed to "food" in the sense of, say, an apple or pear. And if you like, you could read this poem not only as a description of a common experience – feeling very hungry, grabbing some junk food that will fill but not quite satisfy you – but also as a darkly humorous critique of how a capitalist society packages our needs in a way that leaves us needing more.

The poet is describing a familiar sight here: the bag, inflated like a balloon, that ends up holding many fewer potato chips than you think, or than you think you need. It's sort of a great bladder, filled with air, that deflates easily. He compares it to his stomach, also a sort of bag filled with items resembling food. One twin (the stomach) fills as the other (the bag) empties. The two are linked, the man's innards & the bag's crisps. Why is the bag the darker twin? Is it because his stomach can become full, & even too full, & the bag never has quite enough? Is it because a stomach can feel contented but the bag of crisps is calculated never quite to satisfy? He's eaten all the potato chips, but he still wants more. His hand goes further & further into the bag – like a glove, he says. First the bag is like his stomach, now it's like a hand covering. His snack keeps metamorphosing into bodily parts or body coverings. It's a bit eerie, a touch surreal.

Another familiar sight is the little bits of potato chip clinging to the inside of the bag, despite your best efforts to hoover up all available contents. It's a minor thing, of course, but acquires significance in  the poem: all the poet can come up with are bits that he describes in words conveying brokenness, a dangerous sharpness, rejected leftovers, something destroyed, broken, fragmented: shards, jagged / in the depths, the world's splintered residue. It's a  bit comic to describe little bits of flavored greasy potato chips clinging inside a bag in such evocative terms. But it replicates what most of us feel when we're eating a snack & it's run out before we want it to: it's not really a big deal, the people gulping down crisps are mostly not people facing serious hunger, we know we should be eating something healthier but we gave in to a craving: but it's still annoying in a way that seems, in the moment, important. And we can recognize the comedy in our reaction & still feel it as a reflection of our general disappointment in life. There's an underlying critique here, as I mentioned, of a consumer capitalism that comes close to satisfying our desires while still leaving us craving more. (I think it's not a coincidence that the crisps are in a tart flavor that is a chemical re-creation of a traditional dish; is this an attempt to sell us some profitable evocation of a national nostalgia?.) But beyond that, the poem is a weirdly comic & even unsettling look at the way our deeper hungers are never quite satisfied by the world.

I took this poem from Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985 - 2023 by Amit Chaudhuri.