9/15/2005 11:41:00 PM|||The Zen Master|||It's well known that the Chinese have a taste for many delicacies that would make much of the world grimace: pig trotters, chicken feet, shark fins, snakes, intestines, stomachs, and tree fungi, among seemingly limitless others. You'd think, however, that they couldn't make even that prized delicacy of the American cupboard--the potato chip--seem revolting. But America's own storied snack manufacturer, Lay's, has perverted the standard chip into something resembling the more traditional Middle Kingdom snack of dried shrimp or shriveled, puckeringly sour plums. Sure, I've seen ketchup-, ham-, and pickle-flavored chips in Spain, but those still seem to somehow belong to the same genre: you could eat chips with any of those things and it wouldn't seem out of place at a Fourth of July picnic. These Chinese varieties (and I'm not even talking about homegrown brands, which create Frankensteinian flavor-powders that I'm sure rival even these, but who package their products exclusively in Chinese and therefore inaccessibly to my current powers of interpretation) will perhaps offer some insight into the nature of the Chinese palate, and into why even I, a pretty die-hard chowhound (slash foodie, but only when I have the money), find myself a bit intimidated when eating here, especially without language to help decipher what it is I'm eating.

|||112679989602946610|||The taste of Chinese chips