Chips

I post a lot about food, don't I?  Well, food is pretty important and anyway, this topic never ceases to amuse me here.

Chips - mostly potato but also tortilla - are a relatively new thing here.  They even call them "chips" (cheeps!) so you can see they're non-French enough for the French Language Police to not have come up with a new word for them yet.

So I got a little bag of tortilla chips today.  This is what it says on the bag: "Tortillas chips, goût nature - les crêpes très très au sud de la Bretagne" (Tortilla[s] chips, natural flavor [meaning they're not made into a different taste by adding spices or whatever, more on this coming...] - crepes from very, very far south of Brittany [the western peninsula of France].)

Okay...what?  Firstly, French people have difficulty conceptualizing flat, roundish, flour- or corn-based foods as anything other than crepes.  Pancakes are called "very thick crepes" and apparently tortilla chips are also a kind of crepe!  I never see tortilla chips in smaller grocery stores - although bizarrely there is a good amount of salsa to be found - so it's clear that they aren't really a thing here.

Secondly, I have no clue what's meant by that reference to Brittany: do they mean somewhere in the south of Brittany they make tortilla chips (doubtful)?  Is that a reference to perhaps Spain, which is indeed south of all of France?  Breton cuisine is considered somewhat exotic and very "authentic" in the rest of France so adding a connection to Brittany will often bring up good connotations.  But as far as I can see tortilla chips have nothing to do with Brittany.  Any ideas?

Next topic: potato chips.  Anyone who has attempted to buy potato chips here has come across the same thing, I'm sure, but the flavors here never fail to astound and delight (in theory).

In the US there are things like sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, BBQ, cheddar cheese, etc.  France has the former two but also some mind-boggling flavors like: braised chicken; roasted chicken with thyme; cheeseburger; kebab; pepperoni pizza; "spicy" (meaning "with spices" not necessarily "hot"); bolognese (as in the type of tomato sauce); mustard and pickles.  And then "natural" which would be like "original."

Although I've never been inclined to try any except the roasted chicken with thyme (which were weird but decent) I always stop and look at the chip displays; the craziness of the flavors always cheers me up!


Oh and, PS: I must have had an excellent accent today, because one person I spoke to thought I was from Brittany, and one American tourist thought I was a French person who just spoke very good English!  Not sure whether to be pleased about that or to suspect that French has invaded my brain enough to make my English sound weird.