Two beach chairs sit side by side in front of the glittering blue ocean. The sun is shining. And in between those chairs, nestled in the warm sand, is a perky yellow bag of Funyuns. That’s a mural I saw in the Frito-Lay headquarters in Plano, Texas. I was there! My pilgrimage to the pinnacle of potato chips! Each step I took down those carpeted corporate hallways was a bounce. I love potato chips. I love snack foods as a whole category, but chips are my number one. I have a stash under my desk that I share on our office snack table when the mood calls for it. I have a designated “chip plate” my coworkers know by name. At my last job I became known for shrieking “They put chips on your sandwich!” every time we ate at a local lunch spot (that had no other redeeming qualities).

I’m trying to set myself up here to explain how I ended up at Frito-Lay headquarters, standing in a stainless-steel-outfitted Culinary Innovation Center in front of a spread of chips, accepting a strawberry Bubly water from a guy called Chef Jody.

Because the thing about chips is, they’re perfect. The reason chips are perfect is their texture. They’re crispy. And crispy foods are the best foods.

Okay, fine! I also like jiggly. A colleague of mine wrote a piece about the beauty of chewy. Another is enamored with “crispy gone soggy.” There are other fantastic food textures out there. But why is crispy so alluring, so valuable, so desirable? Bon Appétit used it around 500 times (I’m rounding up) last year to describe everything from salmon skin to the top of baked French toast. Frito-Lay yearns to achieve hyperbolic levels of crisp. Popeyes has us lined up for crispy chicken sandwiches. The opulence-forward restaurant Benu in San Francisco has served “pork with inverted crispy skin” on its $325 per person tasting menu.

In the datasphere, the use of crispy/crispiness in U.S. reviews on Yelp has increased 20 percent in the past decade. In close to 7,000 menus analyzed by Stanford’s Dan Jurafsky, crispy is by far the most frequent adjective used to describe texture. The Cheesecake Factory uses the words crisp or crispy nearly 50 times on ONE menu. Researchers have revealed that people find crispy foods “appealing” and “enjoyable,” and that people associate crispy and crunchy food sounds with “FUN” and “pleasantness.” Get this, brainiacs: Neurons in our orbitofrontal cortex DING DING DING like game-show bells whenever we eat crispy foods. Crispy is everywhere. Crispy is beloved. Crispy is...

Totally calculated.

Our predictable, blatant obsession with crispy has sparked an entire food and marketing industry that caters to it. You can measure crispy, engineer it, and promote it. Scientists can make crispy crispier. But why do we love it? How do we see it, hear it, and taste it? What even is it? Who the heck is crunch? Let’s get to the bottom of this bag of potato chips.

Are we having funyun yet? Photo by Alex Lau

First, Put On a Lab Coat

The study of crispy started in the food lab that brought the world Jell-O, instant coffee, and a Seinfeldian array of breakfast cereals: General Foods (now owned by Kraft Heinz). Scientists weren’t paying close attention to food texture until the legendary General Foods research scientist Alina Szczesniak broke it wide open in the ’50s. Me summarizing her work: “Everyone’s obsessing over how foods taste and totally ignoring how important TEXTURE is to the experience of FLAVOR.” The other scientists: “Oh daaaaaaaaaamn. She’s right.”