Pringles Really Are Potato Chips After All!

The U.K.'s Valued-Added Tax doesn't usually apply to food, but potato-based snacks are a different matter. As a snack food, they're presumably regarded as something less than a necessity. The good folks at Pringles, though, probably fearing that they were losing sales from customers who didn't want the extra VAT expense, thought that they might have a way around it. It seems reasonable enough--Pringles are much more bland than other potato chips, and they look and taste like they've been processed within an inch of their lives. Lives that they never had, by the way, because it seems like there's nothing natural about them in any manner.

Unfortunately, Procter & Gamble couldn't convince the British courts of that. Last year, a judge had bought the argument that, since Pringles are only 42 percent potato, have uniform taste and shape (a shape that "is not found in nature," by the way), and are packaged in tubes rather than in bags, they're actually more like cakes or cookies than like chips. Yeah, I don't understand how that argument got them the time of day, either. But common sense has prevailed. Pringles may not exactly seem like potato chips, but they're a lot closer to that than, say, Twinkies.

Now that's got me wondering. In a contest between Pringles and Twinkies, which would decay first?