Requiem For a King

Well, its official, Chips and Salsa are dead. Now, for the record, I'm not talking about nachos, because nachos will be with us until the end of time due to the MCF - melted cheese factor. The MCF is a scientific theory I have developed that postulates that human beings will eat 83% of the substances on the planet if you pour melted cheese on top of them. When you throw in the BC - the bacon corollary, that percentage skyrockets to 99% - only excrement and "things found stuck to a subway platform" were eliminated. You can read all about my findings in the June issue of The Journal of Angioplasty and Coronary Disease.



But chips and salsa (sans cheese) are over as a primary food source. I don't know when it happened but I have noticed it for quite some time, yet I didn't say anything for fear of declaring a premature death (kind of like those news stories you occasionally hear about a hospital or nursing home sending some poor person off to the morgue while they were still breathing. For God's sake, how hard is it to stick a mirror under some one's nose - you don't even need medical training! But I digress.) I went to two parties this past weekend, both incredibly fun affairs (a Kentucky Derby party and a Cinco de Mayo party if you must know) and both served copious amounts of food, including (the dearly departed) chips and salsa. And, as I suspected, the chips and salsa were routinely ignored in favor of new flashier appetizers like those cheese/spinach puff things, spring rolls and dim sum, or old standbys like pigs in a blanket, chicken skewers and the cheese and cracker platter. And chips and salsa can't even hold their own against other dips, routinely getting their asses kicked by artichoke dips, sour cream and onion, crab, and its own cousin - the Mexican cheese dip (MCF at work in two of the three dips of course). Did I mention that one of the parties we went to this weekend had a Mexican theme? If you are chips and salsa and you can't even defend your home turf, what chance do you have in a non-Latino setting? Where did it all end? One minute chips and salsa were the talk of the town - a must have if you were throwing a cocktail party. Now, they sit lonely and ignored until the chips are so stale and chewy, you can blow bubbles with them, and the salsa gets that crusty green film on top from sitting untouched for so long.



I can't tell you how many times we have hosted a party and as I am cleaning up afterward (or is it afterword, I can never get that straight), I empty an entire bowl of salsa back into its container. And it goes into the back of the refrigerator with the other seven partially-full salsas until two years later when you end up cleaning out the refrigerator and you come face to face with six to ten dead salsa containers. Where have you gone Jose' DiMaggio? A nation turns its hungry eyes away from you. But the chips and salsa industry doesn't seem to mind because until now, no one has had the guts to declare them dead. So people will still keep buying them and putting them out, and stuffing them in the backs of their pantries and refrigerators, refusing to acknowledge they are gone. But I will. I will stand up and publicly mourn this first ballot Appetizer Hall of Fame inductee. Take your place in the Pantheon with the retired appetizers like Potato Skins, Pickled Eggs, and Cru-de-te (other than the carrots and broccoli). Enjoy the hereafter.