With Norma Berrellez absent, Oz Puerta and Luis Hernandez faced questions on the Magnolia Corridor, RTRP construction and the future of the Galleria at Tyler.
Welcome back! Last week we strained things out—separating, catching, perhaps releasing our biases about what deserves to pass through and what we hold onto. If you spent time noticing what gets caught, what slips through, and what we choose to keep, you’re already thinking like an editor of the everyday.
This week, we’re moving from ways we filter things out of our food to ways that we get food into our mouths. Our creative nudge? An empty chip bag.
Yes, the crinkly, colorful, mostly air-filled vessel that once delivered your daily salt intake in a single serving. Not just any chip bag—all chip bags. Crinkled foil pouches, glossy plastic sleeves, family-size, fun-size, gas station impulse buys, and yes, even the cylindrical optimism of a Pringles can. If it once delivered chips into your life, it qualifies. I’ve finished a bowl of sea salt kettle chips and pretzel twists while finishing this column as a meta reflection on snack foods and creativity. Which means I now have two bags to play around with!
I picked this for our nudge because I can’t stop finding them. Side of the road, under bushes, tangled in fences, fluttering like accidental flags of the snack economy. I’ve used hundreds in my assemblage work—once weaving them into a kind of cornucopia using chicken wire. Bright reds, radioactive greens, electric blues, an endless wheel of eye-catching colors designed to stand out on a snack rack.
Chip bags are fascinating to me. They are tiny billboards—highly engineered objects designed to seek out your food budget. Bold typography, exaggerated flavor names (Flamin’ Hot, Cool Ranch, Sweet Heat Mango Tango BBQ Explosion), celebrity tie-ins, mascots with backstories more developed than some movie characters. And yet, for all that effort, they’re usually in our hands for minutes… then months or years as litter.
They also hold a kind of cultural primacy. Snack foods are part of important rituals. Road trips, lunchboxes, halftime shows, late-night cravings. Which makes them perfect for a few minutes of creative attention before they vanish (or worse, stick around where they shouldn’t).
I bet you’ve got one near the top of your trash can! If not, this might be just the reason to finish off the Lay’s before breakfast. Poke around under the driver’s seat, or in the office lunchroom for those orphans of the mini snack packs shoved in a random cupboard. They’ll pair wonderfully with one or more of these creative nudges:
1. Branding Ironic: Flatten your chip bag and really look at it. Study the color choices, the fonts, the layout. Where do your eyes go first? What’s oversized? What’s hiding? Now imagine this as an artifact from 200 years ago. Sketch or write a museum label for it: This ceremonial wrapper was used to preserve intense flavor hallucinations.
2. Crinkle Comp: Chip bags are instruments hiding in plain sight. Crinkle, tear, pop, or twist. Each motion creates a different sound. Record a short “chip bag symphony.” Layer rhythms. Add a second bag (or a Pringles can drum if you’re feeling orchestral). Title your piece like a serious composer: No. 2 in Sodium Major.
3. Residuals: Open the bag and take a cautious inhale. What’s left behind? Salt? Spice? Artificial nostalgia? Write a short piece describing the flavor without naming it. Could someone guess “barbecue” or “cool ranch” from your description alone? Or invent a completely new flavor profile based on the scent.
4. In the Bag: Cut the bag into strips and try weaving, folding, or braiding it. Combine multiple bags if you have them. Make something small: a patch, a bracelet, a tiny mat, a repair for something unexpected. This is industrial design meeting handmade improvisation.
5. It’s the Flava: You’ve certainly noticed a chip flavor and said to yourself, “who would want that?” Now it’s your turn. Invent a new chip flavor that doesn’t exist yet—but probably will. Come up with a name, describe the taste, design the tagline. “Backyard Rainstorm Lime.” “Midnight Gas Station Coffee Crunch.” What would your bag look like? Who is it for?
Chip bags are strange cultural artifacts. They’re cheap, disposable, engineered for desire, and somehow everywhere you turn. They reflect what we crave, how we’re marketed to, and how quickly something can go from irresistible to irrelevant. But like all the objects we play with here, they’re more than their intended use. They’re color, texture, sound, memory—temporary canvases waiting for a second look before they fade into the background (or the roadside).
So, this week, take a few minutes with something meant to be thrown away. Study it. Play with it. Maybe even make something that lasts longer than the flavor did. Because creativity, like a good snack, doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to be opened. And shared.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, used here as a creative collaborator and helper for those times “I need a word for…”
