How Cheese Curls Were Invented | Hacker News Reader

How Cheese Curls Were Invented

tedium.co

26 pointspkd15 comments

Long ago when I was a teenager I suggested to my father that one might be able to take the husks off popcorn kernels, grind the core into powder and mix with something (water or oil), heat it and spray it out a nozzle under high pressure. The idea was that it would explosively decompress and produce popcorn with no husks. He looked at me and said "what do you think Cheetoes is?"

It's funny, but I have to say that I've never heard the term cheese curls before. People in my area most always use "Cheezies". I guess this is a bit of a genericized trademark thing. The Cheezies brand is quite popular around here, and in some ways their history is similar to the one described in the article.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/jim-marker-moulded-c...

(Author here.) Wow, that's fascinating. I've always heard them referred to as cheese curls—that strikes me as an interesting example of how regionalisms tend to change the names of common things. Like, the Chee Wees I mention? They're incredibly common in a specific region of the U.S., but outside of it they don't even register.

I wrote a piece about ranch dressing a year and a half ago, and it was a similar situation—outside of the U.S., nobody knew what ranch dressing was, so Doritos had to use, uh, creative naming strategies to get around the unfamiliarity.

It's interesting how it evolved from relatively low tech beginnings. For the opposite approach, I once spent some time with the lead engineer on Pringles (we were considering hiring the firm he worked for for some non-food work). He was justifiably proud of the technical challenges they had overcome and how much work they'd done based on the initial spec. No agilenprocess, but definitely spiral rather than waterfall development.

I was fascinated but haven't eaten pringles since.

I also once worked with a guy whose first job out of high school was at a/the Velveeta plant. I'd never tried the product and after his stories the idea makes me sick.

Please tell us more about these 2.

Makes me think of the book that made the US public demand food quality laws.

It contained graphic descriptions of working conditions and accidents in a meat processing plant.

Thing is that the author intended it as a rallying cry for workers rights, but the public instead focused on what they were buying and eating.

You're referring to "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

Just going to leave the reference to the book here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

Edit: Didn't see gumby's post since I was reading over the article before posting.

BTW, ol' Sinclair sure had a talent with words.

I went to the Wikipedia page and found some vandalism (which I fixed). What a bizarre page to choose to vandalize!

I heard from a P&G employee that Pringles came about due to technological advances in how they made nappies. Someone realised their unique process could be used for cooking and shaping food products and Pringles was the result!

That's not what I remember though it's quite possible. The development was outsourced to SWRI who does quite a lot of this work. There was a spec and SWRI developed everything from the formulation (binders, structural members etc) to the manufacturing process (something that survived mfg intact and in which failures wouldn't gum up the works) and mfg equipment. But it's quite possible a prototype had been developed at P&G's labs first (I have no idea if I would have been told that, or if I was and have forgotten).

I've read some interesting facts I didn't know, but how about how unhealthy they are?

You need to be told that deep-fried (or even baked) carbohydrates covered in trans-fats && heavily salted artificially-flavored mock-cheese powder are unhealthy?

As a general rule, avoid eating anything that is Trump-colored.

Author here. It goes without saying, doesn't it? It's literally called "junk food."

You can get information about why it's bad for you from a million sources (the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which I briefly mention in the piece, is a good starting point), but information about how it came to be? Now that requires a little digging.

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