
Back in the 1980s, my school lunchbox was dominated by all the healthy things kids need to grow up; y’know, limp cheese and marmite sandwiches, a different chocolate biscuit everyday (Trio or Club anyone?) and invariably a packet of maize or corn snacks.
I’ve always been a sucker for vinegary flavours be it Salt and said Vinegar or Pickled Onion, with Monster Munch arguably the daddy of that flavour (although never rule out Space Raiders), but being the carnivore I am, meaty flavours do have their appeal and no meat flavour is better in my opinion than that of bacon. One of the finest examples of its time were the Sizzling Bacon Flavour Hunks of Monster Munch by Smith’s. Always offering a dilemma of a choice between them and the Pickled Onion variety, they never let me down and for some reason combined well with the post-swim smell of chlorine – or maybe that’s just nostalgia kicking in! Either way, when Walkers took over the brand and dispensed with Smokey Bacon (which is what I recall the flavour being named) it was a sad day in the history of crisps. Surpassed in the bacon stakes only by another of Smith’s bygone range, the Football Crazy, bacon Monster Munch truly were joy to eat.
9/10