Kettle Chips "Roasted Red Pepper with Goat Cheese" flavor

Highbrow or just cheesy?

If there are still lingering questions about the forced-gentrification of the American palate by the Food Network and other culprits, Kettle Chips is not in doubt.

Kettle chips has introduced perhaps its most pretentious flavor, "roasted red pepper with goat cheese" (all in small letters, like the e.e. cummings poem potential buyers may have been asked to read in 9th grade english).

Kettle Foods invites you to discriminate this goat cheese from its "TUSCAN THREE CHEESE" (in all capital letters, probably because they were forced to capitalize "Tuscan") and its "NEW YORK CHEDDAR WITH HERBS" (all caps here too). Without the added HERBS New York Cheddar might seem like the unsophisticated American cousin of the other two flavors.

The fact of the matter is they all taste pretty good. And they all taste essentially the same.

The flavorings for all three are pretty much identical: cheese solids and "natural" flavorings (micro-amounts of HERBS and/or roasted red pepper). The flavor that tastes best to a given buyer is probably more strongly correlated to the buyer's self-identity than the negligible/arguable difference between these three "flavors".