Dear Mr. Doritos

I have recently acquired a packet of your Baja Fiery Mango Doritos, and I am hard pressed to say who I’m most disappointed with: you, for making them, Mr. Dew, for allowing you to corrupt their already less-than-honorable name with this product, myself, for buying them, or God, for not rapturing us all before such an affront could be perpetrated upon a fallen world.

It's not that these chips of yours are bad. Well, strike that - these chips of yours are bad. Really bad. Absolutely terrible. Almost maliciously vile. These chips are so bad, in fact, that they’ve caused me to reconsider a long-held belief that there is a bottom limit to how bad corn chips can be. I’ve eaten a lot of corn chips in my life, sir, and at no point did I consider that a corn chip could really be any worse than “meh” and then you eat the entire bag anyway. These corn chips are so much worse than “meh” that they are actually rewriting my internal definition of what constitutes a bad chip. I accidentally bought two 2 ⅝ ounce bags of these chips and I don’t even want to finish one; I’m not even sure what to do with the second. Feed them to my chickens? Chickens are nature’s garbage disposals and I doubt they’d even want anything to do with these abominations.

No, sir, what I mean to say is that it’s not just that these chips are bad. They’re definitely that, but there’s so much more than that.

Let’s talk about the packaging briefly, though, before we get too far into the abysmal taste of these chips. You actually deserve one single point on the packaging, because you get right something that no one ever, ever gets right, in packaging, books, movies, tv shows, music videos, advertisements, musicals, punch and judy shows, any cultural entertainments: the peppers and mango on the poorly drawn cartoon package are actually floating on top of lava. This is correct! Lava is actually really dense and there isn’t much that won’t float on top of it. Maybe lead would sink? Otherwise, stuff floats on lava. Of course, you had to go and fucking ruin it by showing a shark jumping out of the lava, which wouldn’t happen because the lava is too dense for the shark to ever get under the surface of. Yes, yes, I know, artistic license, if this was reality the shark would go up in flames like a redneck’s house at a gender reveal party, but still I’m more willing to accept “the shark magically doesn’t catch fire” and less willing to accept a shark so dense it’s apparently made of polonium.

Also, sir, I don’t know what sort of shitty geologists you have working in your graphic design department, because while I’m willing to accept a wave of lava (yes, it wouldn’t happen like that, but whatever) what I am not willing to accept is whatever this white foam on the top of the lava wave is. Sea foam is actually an incredibly complicated mixture of organic compounds, water, air, emulsifiers, proteins, and lord knows what else; you know what you don’t get in lava? Any of that stuff. Did anyone there actually think through this packaging? Or did you accept help from the mad flavorists at Mr. Dew’s laboratory in the art department too and say “God DAMN it Herschel I don’t care if lava wouldn’t foam I want a lava wave I can surf on NOW” and slam a shot of Old Smuggler before tossing that rebellious intern out a fourth story window for the crime of suggesting your packaging have a passing resemblance to actual geology?

But none of this is why I am writing to you, sir. Now is when I need to excoriate you for the crimes against flavor you are committing with this so-called “snack food.” Your crimes, sir, are many, and I will be listing them and yes, there will be a quiz at the end, so please pay attention. First of all: in what world does it make any sense at all to combine cheddar cheese and mango? Even though the mango flavor barely tastes like mango at all, it does indeed gesture in that direction, and even the barest gesture towards mango melded with cheddar cheese is a miserable combination. There are vanishingly few sweet flavors, sir, that go well with cheddar cheese, and mango is NOT one of them. The only one I can really think of is apples, and even then, it needs to be a tart apple with a very fine, very sharp cheddar cheese. Whatever the source of the cheese powder you drenched these chips with, it is neither fine nor sharp, and this mango is neither tart nor apple.

Now, sir, I need to make a personal digression. Mostly I believe my description of the horror of these chips has so far been something that applies to all – no one actually likes cheesy mangos, if they did, they would serve it at Mr. Bell’s fine taco emporium in a gordita wrapper – but something that I personally noticed when eating these chips is that they caused instant acid reflux. It is quite unpleasant! It wasn’t until I was trying to figure out by reading the ingredients to see if the mango flavor was natural or artificial that I noticed that wayyyyyyyy down at the bottom of the ingredients list was sucralose! The personal detail here is that I am hilariously, tragically allergic to sucralose and most other artificial sweeteners, and perhaps that is why these chips cause instant acid reflux for me! I’m actually pretty mad at you, sir, for not making the presence of sucralose more clear on the packaging, and I feel duped, because who in their right mind would put sucralose on corn chips! It is absurd! It is unnecessary! It is terrible! Who does that! You should be ashamed, sir.

But all of this aside – and this would be quite enough! – none of these things are the worst part of these chips. No, the worst part – and I physically recoil at using this word, but I saw it used and now you get to hear it too – is the “swicy” aspect of them. I am a human who exists in America in 2024, and so I have noticed the absolute proliferation of “spicy” snack foods that, frankly, aren’t very good, and in the last six months in particular we have seen an explosion in sweet-spicy (aka swicy, barf) snack foods that are, frankly, even worse.

Almost all of those spicy foods have a particular flaw that makes them mostly terrible, and that flaw is the fact that you and your cohort of snack food snake oil salesmen are just tossing some pure capsaicin in the spice mix and letting it cook. The spiciness is almost never properly integrated with the rest of the flavors, and as a result it never makes sense. You’re eating a thing, and then all of a sudden, BOOM spicy. It is unpleasant! I like spicy food, hell I grow my own scotch bonnet peppers every year; I can handle some serious spice, and there’s a deep unpleasantness to all the spicy snacks that are everywhere this year. Whenever I have one, I imagine that the product creation process involved an animated Goofy in your test kitchen carrying a bottle of pure cap and tripping while yelling “oh gawrsh!” and suddenly the spice mix is full of pure cap and now you, sir, are talking to the marketing team about how to somehow still make a profit on this batch of ruined spice.

Now, sir, this trend in food isn’t your fault, but you have definitely jumped on the bandwagon, and I can say for certain that this product is the absolute apotheosis of that trend. When you first eat a chip, there is no spice, and then, once you’ve choked down the sickly-sweet fake mango that is for some godforsaken reason mixed with cheddar cheese, suddenly BAM here comes a frankly awful heat that screws up your taste buds and makes you wonder what you were thinking when you bought this terrible product. These Baja Fiery Mango Doritos are so bad they actually make me like your other products less.

But… with all of that said, maybe this isn’t your fault. You may remember, sir, that way, way back at the beginning of this letter, I mentioned the Divine. These chips are so bad that I actually wonder if you’re tapping into something spiritual. I wonder if, perhaps, God did actually start the Rapture a few months ago, and we’re all such sinners that none of us noticed it happening. And I wonder if you picked up on that. Perhaps we are all on a countdown to doomsday now, and perhaps you picked up on those vibes, and realizing that we are now separated from the Garden of Eden by yet another eschatological event, you, sir, decided to try to recreate Eden in your own way… without realizing that the entire world – you too, but the world as well – were corrupted by Satan and that instead of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, we would now be tempted by the Baja Fiery Mango Doritos of the Safeway Shelf.

You might say, sir, that this is a bridge too far… but honestly, it makes more sense than mixing mango with fuckin’ cheddar cheese.

Sincerely,

Alex Parise