Mr. Frugality: Drop the Potato Chip! Now!

Mr. Frugality here. In my quest to find better and cheaper alternatives for everyday living, I have found many excellent alternatives to products Americans take for granted every day. I recently acquired a potato slicer, which can also work for other types of vegetables. I pondered… is it really cheaper to make your own potato chips, or to buy them from the store? Let’s find out. As a man of science, we need to at least inject some scientific method into our investigation.

We already know what we are looking to find out, and we are theorizing that it is cheaper to make homemade potato chips than buy them at the store. Assuming I get all of the listed brands of chips at the same store, we can neglect the cost of gas influencing this experiment, but it is important to know that fuel costs are there. Let’s look at the data, starting with a brand of chips everybody loves- Doritos. They taste great, are messy, but what are you really eating in that chip? An investigation concludes that, when you eat a doritos potato chip, you are eating the following ingredients:

 Whole Corn, Vegetable Oil (Contains One Or More of The Following: Corn, Soybean, And/Or Sunflower Oil), Salt, Cheddar Cheese (Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes), Maltodextrin, Wheat Flour, Whey, Monosodium Glutamate, Buttermilk Solids, Romano Cheese from Cow's Milk (Part-Skim Cow's Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes), Whey Protein Concentrate, Onion Powder, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean And Cottonseed Oil, Corn Flour, Disodium Phosphate, Lactose, Natural And Artificial Flavor, Dextrose, Tomato Powder, Spices, Lactic Acid, Artificial Color (Including Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 40), Citric Acid, Sugar, Garlic Powder, Red And Green Bell Pepper Powder, Sodium Caseinate, Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, Nonfat Milk Solids, Whey Protein Isolate, And Corn Syrup Solids. Contains Milk And Wheat Ingredients.

 That is a LOT of crap. As a general rule of thumb, the longer the list of ingredients is, the more unhealthy a food is for you. The chip is cooked in vegetable oil, sometimes sunflower oil. For lactose intolerant individuals- you are screwed. There are milks, cheeses, as well as butter, glutamate, concentrates, other hydrogenated oils, disodium phosphate, lactose, dextrose, lactic acid, sugar and other goodies in there that I am not sure about. Let’s look at the nutrition facts.

While there are no trans fats, you are eating quite a helping of saturated fat, likely from the cheese and milk ingredients. If I eat roughly 5 ounces per day of chips, I am eating a whopping 750 calories and 40 grams of FAT, just from an “innocent” snack. As someone with heart disease in their family, the sodium is low, but it accumulates. At least you are getting some protein and calcium, likely from the milk products. Now that we have established that doritos are not a healthy snack food, let’s look at the price. If we were to buy 99 cent bags only for a year, it would cost us $1,042 dollars! That is nuts!

But if we go for the larger bags, we are still paying a hefty sum of cash- almost $700 dollars, for unwanted health problems. Doritos sure taste good, but it is something I can sacrifice for a greater good. Another junk food I like eating is Andy Caps hot fries. These things are delicious, but it’s time to face the facts. If you down a bag, you are eating 360 calories. I like to eat two, so let’s double that to 720 calories. At two bags, I am eating 24g of fat, 0g of cholesterol, but *censored*, I am eating 1800mg of sodium! Almost a full days worth! Then two bags are 120g of carbs! I can definitely stand to drop these.

They cost 43 cents per ounce, at an annual cost of $784. OUCH. Sometimes stores have a generic potato chip that costs a lot less than main brands. Sometimes they suck, sometimes they are good. Safeway has a generic BBQ chip that sells for $2.29 for a 11.5 oz bag. The price isn’t bad, but what about the ingredients? One ounce is 110 calories. At my rate of consumption, that is 550 calories out of the snack. There are 15g of fat and a whopping 1200mg of sodium. There are also 75g of carbs in there, with a bit of calcium and protein from somewhere. In short, they are a better and healthier chip, but still bad.

A straight bag of Lays potato chips offers the third healthiest alternative with a hefty price tag. You can get baked lays as well, but they cost EVEN MORE than the regular lays potato chips. So how can we find a healthier snack food without breaking the bank? Well, are you prepared to set aside 20 minutes? Let’s look at the nutritional facts for a lightly salted potato. If I am using 90% of the potato in the potato chip batch, I am consuming roughly 188 calories on average. There are 0g of fat (there is some, but it is miniscule), 0g of cholesterol, 26mg of sodium, 58g of carbohydrates and 6g of protein, not to mention a little Vitamin A, Calcium, and hefty chunks of Iron and Vitamin C.

If I slice ONE potato for a snack, lightly salt said potato and bake them in the microwave on a crisper, I am paying, minus electricity and the initial cost of equipment ($20) about 16 cents for that potato. If you slice a potato, dry the slices, and throw them on the crisper in the microwave for 2 minutes each round (thin slices, and it also depends on your microwave), you can easily accumulate 2-3 ounces in about 20 minutes. We have an opportunity cost in play here- is the time you spend making the chips worth the difference in price to you?

Over the long term, it is not reasonable to pay the convenience cost of bagged chips. With the potato slicing, you are eating a vastly healthier and BAKED potato chip at a substantially lower cost. Make it more fun by throwing in another person and talking. Just be careful not to cut yourself! Sorry Pepsico. I really enjoy your stuff, but I like the savings I am getting by making my own homemade potato chips. I am sure there are some GREAT recipes on the internet.