Perfection only makes oddity more appealing

I was eating Pringles the other day for the first time in a thousand years, and I wondered: “How do they get them all to look like this, each of them perfectly nestled, each with the gentle swoop of a Panama hat brim without the crown?”

I have no idea why that can of Pringles ended up on my snack tray, because I never eat junk like that. I’m more of a health-food nut — Fritos or Cheetos. Never Pringles.

I probably bought them in anticipation of my grandkids coming to visit, or maybe I got them as a promotion if I bought some other thing that is likely to kill you from saturated fat, MSG or excess glucose.

But my grandkids never opened the Pringles can, because they are addicted to whatever next-generation junk they are hooked on — like Takis, which I never heard of until my grandkids told me that they are the staff of life.

But there the Pringles were after the grandkids left, so I opened them — onion and sour cream flavor — and I started to snack on them one late night between my second and third glass of Jameson’s triple distilled Irish whiskey. I figured two bouts of triple distilled whiskey earned me at least one round of saturated fat. It’s all about the balance because, as I said, I’m a health nut.

And although I found them tasty enough, I found myself fascinated by whatever process it took to make them nestle neatly together in the can, each of them an exact clone of the Pringle below and above it, with not a single one of them out of line or shattered by careless handling.

Because, let’s face it, any other potato chips (I assume Pringles start with potatoes, or maybe rutabagas, or turnips) end up as a jumble of crumbs at the bottom of the bag, good only for the crunchy sprinkle on top of some tuna casserole.

But not Pringles. The last Pringle at the bottom of the can is as perfect as that first Pringle you met at the very top.

And when I popped off the top of that can of Pringles, I asked: “How do they do that?”

I used to live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company produced such fine addictive tobacco products as Winstons, Salems, Pall Malls, Camels, Kools, Dorals, Newports, and countless other coffin nails. It was 1970, and cigarettes in that town cost a quarter a pack from the machine, or $1.90 for a carton, which was less than a penny a cigarette. At prices like that, you couldn’t afford not to smoke.

But I wondered: How do they make these things, each of them exactly like the others?

The R.J. Reynold’s Tobacco Company proudly offered tours of their operations, and at the end of the tour, they gave you two samples of their wares—cigarettes, cigars, snuff, whatever.

I took the tour, and I was most fascinated with how they rolled the tobacco to create the cigarettes.

A machine held a spool of rolling paper that was no less than five miles long, and as it spun it curled the paper around an endless stream of tobacco. Interspersed in that stream every six inches or so was a filter, about two inches long.

The result was a 5-mile long cigarette—6 inches of tobacco, followed by 2 inches of filter, forever and forever—until a chopping machine split both the filter and the wrapped cigarette into the proper lengths, each of them exactly like the one before it.

Except, sometimes, the chopping machine broke down. And then the whole operation had to be shut down and restarted, with giant lengths of unchopped cigs thrown into the garbage bin.

And that was what I wanted to take away as my gift from my visit to the wonderful R.J. Reynolds empire — a cigarette six feet long, with an unchopped two-inch filter every six inches or so. Forget the two gifts of pre-packaged perfect products that the company sold every day. I wanted that Frankensmoke in an umbrella stand in the corner of my apartment to amaze friends and amuse visitors.

But no, they wouldn’t let me have one, because to release one massively failed product out into the world would be to admit that cigarettes aren’t divinely inspired and born perfect, each and every one.

I thought of that when I opened that can of perfect Pringles, each and every one as perfect as the one before and after it.

And I wondered what wonders you might find if you could sniff around in Pringles Central to find whatever Frankenchips might be lurking around in the trash bins — non-nesting Pringles shaped like derbies, Stetsons, bowlers and tams, never to pass the Panama-hat brim test.

Admit it, you’d like to see that too, right?

Because if you’re not fascinated and somehow drawn by the odd, quirky and imperfect, then why in the world do you read my column?

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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