
How Cheese Curls Were Invented - pkd
http://tedium.co/2016/11/10/cheese-curls-creation-story/
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phkahler
Long ago when I was a teenager I suggested to my father that one might be able
to take the husks off popcorn kernels, grind the core into powder and mix with
something (water or oil), heat it and spray it out a nozzle under high
pressure. The idea was that it would explosively decompress and produce
popcorn with no husks. He looked at me and said "what do you think Cheetoes
is?"

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mast
It's funny, but I have to say that I've never heard the term cheese curls
before. People in my area most always use "Cheezies". I guess this is a bit of
a genericized trademark thing. The Cheezies brand is quite popular around
here, and in some ways their history is similar to the one described in the
article.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/jim-marker-
moulded-c...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/jim-marker-moulded-
cheezies-into-a-canadian-icon/article4104357/)

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shortformblog
(Author here.) Wow, that's fascinating. I've _always_ heard them referred to
as cheese curls—that strikes me as an interesting example of how regionalisms
tend to change the names of common things. Like, the Chee Wees I mention?
They're incredibly common in a specific region of the U.S., but outside of it
they don't even register.

I wrote a piece about ranch dressing a year and a half ago, and it was a
similar situation—outside of the U.S., nobody knew what ranch dressing was, so
Doritos had to use, uh, creative naming strategies to get around the
unfamiliarity.

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gumby
It's interesting how it evolved from relatively low tech beginnings. For the
opposite approach, I once spent some time with the lead engineer on Pringles
(we were considering hiring the firm he worked for for some non-food work). He
was justifiably proud of the technical challenges they had overcome and how
much work they'd done based on the initial spec. No agilenprocess, but
definitely spiral rather than waterfall development.

I was fascinated but haven't eaten pringles since.

I also once worked with a guy whose first job out of high school was at a/the
Velveeta plant. I'd never tried the product and after his stories the idea
makes me sick.

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digi_owl
Makes me think of the book that made the US public demand food quality laws.

It contained graphic descriptions of working conditions and accidents in a
meat processing plant.

Thing is that the author intended it as a rallying cry for workers rights, but
the public instead focused on what they were buying and eating.

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takingflac
Just going to leave the reference to the book here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle)

Edit: Didn't see gumby's post since I was reading over the article before
posting.

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gumby
I went to the Wikipedia page and found some vandalism (which I fixed). What a
bizarre page to choose to vandalize!

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gerfficiency
I've read some interesting facts I didn't know, but how about how unhealthy
they are?

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shortformblog
Author here. It goes without saying, doesn't it? It's literally called "junk
food."

You can get information about why it's bad for you from a million sources (the
Center for Science in the Public Interest, which I briefly mention in the
piece, is a good starting point), but information about how it came to be? Now
that requires a little digging.

