Regular Food Review: Cool Ranch Doritos

(This review was postponed in deference to the Frito-Lay workers’ strike, which concluded on July 24. Congrats and thank you to the hands that made these chips.)

To eat a Cool Ranch Dorito is to see the face of God. There is no other taste quite like it: a concoction of powdered onion and garlic and puckering dairy tang and a laundry list of inscrutable additives, unabashedly artificial yet objectively a gustatory marvel. There’s a recurring joke that one lick of Doritos or Warheads or some other mass-market product of mad scientists would have brought medieval peasants to their knees, and I believe it. Even now, to more advanced modern palates like mine, Cool Ranch Doritos can force a sensory overload if eaten in one non-stop bag-to-fist-to-mouth stream. I had to pace myself with this family-sized bag, lest I make myself feel sick from gorging on too many chips at a time (although, to be candid, that still happened due to poor impulse control). The aftermath of a flavor explosion still lingering on my palate, I took one last Dorito and held it up to the light. Tiny red and green flecks dotted the pocked surface. They almost looked like celestial points in the sky. 4.5/5 stars.