A lot of people give soy-based products a bad rap. I am now one of them. The following is a public service announcement.

I made the recent mistake of going to the grocery store hungry. For me, one of the four major food groups is "Crunchy". Chips, crackers, and other snack foods have been known to disappear at alarming rates down my gullet. My appetite for such things is nearly insatiable. To the shock and horror of some of my coworkers, I have been known to repeatedly misprize doughnuts in favor of the 50-pound sack of spicy trail mix I keep under my desk. I wave to each Doritos or Lay’s delivery driver I see on the road. Get the picture? Crunchy things: I likes ‘em. Naturally, I have my favorites, but I’m always willing to try a little somethin’ new. After all, I have to keep up with current crunchy-snack technology.

For some reason, GenSoy’s Soy Crisps looked attractive. I was bored with the usual junk I cram into my gaping maw, and the Soy Crisps were heavily discounted that day. Garlic herb/onion flavor sounded good to me, and I figured I’d take a chance on a bag of soy chips. "What the heck", I figured, "soy must have come a long way since I last had it, and it tasted like crap". Boy, was I wrong. They were crap.

As it turns out, advances have been made in disguising the disgusting flavorlessness of soy chips, but they haven’t come very far. Apparently, all they can do is liberally coat the vile things with an overabundance of flavor powder that makes each chip taste pretty much like a tablespoon of garlic salt, laundry detergent, and talcum, only it’s more harsh on the throat. The things aren’t much to look at, either; strange, thin cookie-like discs, at once nearly perfectly round, but possessing convoluted surfaces not unlike an underdeveloped human brain. The green specks were, I assumed, infitesimally small bits of pulverized garden shrubbery that had been dried out and mixed with the talcum, in order to provide the illusion of herbs that are actually considered comestible.

I say cookie-like, because the inexplicable white blobs that dotted each disc were evocative of white chocolate chips. At first, I thought that the first disc I pulled from the bag was a sport, a freak of the snack world, and that somehow some relatively unprocessed soy bits had found their way into one chip. All the chips were like this, though. It made me wonder what they were. Crushed soy nuggets? Hominy? Bits of brain? Who knows? The only edible thing I expect to find amorphous white blobs in is hot chocolate, not crispy snacks.

I will admit that the things did satisfy the initial requirement of being crunchy, but upon contact with moisture, they quickly dissolved into a gooey, gelatinous mass. It made me think immediately of the "viral glass" in Richard Preston’s book The Cobra Event. Not a good thing. I put up a brave front, trying to get my money’s worth out of this bag of gustatory woe, but I quickly gave up. It was no use. The things were just plain nasty.

The next time I went to the store, I looked closer at the low price marked on the shelf. "Discontinued Item". Huh. Small wonder.