Pirate's Booty
Hidden in a snack-aisle bin lies a dubious treasure, the understated cousin of Cheetos and cheese balls: the quirky, comedic, and palate-satisfying Pirate's Booty.
The bag is duller than sand. Navy stripes barely suggest water. An unhelpful signpost brandishes health and authenticity claims. A jarringly Powerpoint-era blue gradient depicts a sky bounded by a navy stripe, encapsulated like a diorama by infinite dull beige. To the center left of this bitmapped backgrounds lies the titular booty, a photo of very small rice & corn puffs crammed overflowing into a stylized, gold foil-trimmed treasure chest.
Above it all, a maximally piratical pirate smiles, open mouthed and cocky. His shoulder parrot contributes an open wing, a softer, more feminine complement to the pirate's arms-akimbo power stance. Earring, belt, saber, moustache, bandana, and eyepatch leave zero doubt about his character (namely, that he is a pirate, and presumably the owner of the booty). And it clearly is a character; this man has never pirated a day in his life. The eyepatch feels false, the accessories cheap and overblown. His crimson coat is the sole exception. It's lapels fall open to the left and right, neatly framing the protruding and powerful chin. Equally appropriate for piracy or a night at the club, its crimson cloth elevates our store-brand Gaston.
The contents of the bag have a net weight of just 1/2 oz, the least committal portion size that can still justify its own bag. 70 calories worth of oily seasoned cornmeal await discovery. Whose cut of the booty is this? What role in the pirate code warrants so stingy a share?
The bag's design leavens the mood. It's snug but not cramped, an aluminized crinkly barrel that flatters its poofy contents. Each piece of booty feels oversized in such a constrained space, and there are enough pieces of booty to easily cover the bag's bottom. It's enough space to accommodate a hand, but only barely. There is a real sense of delving into a treasure trove, of being singularly lucky.
The aroma is a milky cheeseball tang. Its pallor has a power all its own. Close your eyes and you could be smelling a Cheeto, open them and you're back in the world of parmesan popcorn. Helpless and bare, the tightly curled puffs are at your mercy.
On the first bite, the puff crunches loudly, then disappears. It is full of empty bluster, a weightless simulacrum, impotent as a wiffle ball. Each puff destroyed leaves behind trace remnants, gritty cornmeal and powdered cheese, and if you eat them fast enough that grit accumulates: a tiny hoard of white gold dust, panned through in your teeth, slipping away in the river of your mouth.
Some puffs, though, are stale. These collapse less violently, their cellophane resilience distinguishing them among their anonymous brethren. Fresh Pirate's Booty is submissive, its blank expression and deferential demeanor a canvas for the projection of desire. It can be whatever you like, but when you probe for substance it disappears, leaving you intrigued and unsatisfied. But stale Pirate's Booty has character, has its own opinions. It's been around too long to cater to fantasies. Its lines and textures assert themselves, holding shape. It may not be the belle of the ball anymore, but its presence is undeniable. That deserves respect.
So it goes when eating puff by puff. Nobody makes it through a bag like that. The right way to eat Pirate's Booty is to pinch a handful out and crunch them all at once, three or four or more. This is the intended dosage, where the cheese dust comes into itself. Where previously the cheesiness was a dim tint surrounding the central dominating crunch, in a handful of Booty the cheese takes center stage. The crunch of four pieces of Booty is only incrementally louder than the crunch of one; there's only so much surface area for teeth to broach. In such a handful the cheese achieves a dank and powerful concentration. It soaks in, it colors your breath, it lingers and intoxicates, a complex dance of savory, fat, acid, and scent layering on itself. What seemed like gold dust is more akin to uranium, its cheese particles multiplying in a runaway chain reaction, building and intensifying until it consumes itself, leaving behind trace elements of corn.
These corn remnants are the lost treasure maps of a lifetime of snacking, distributed and weaving across millions of eaters. The lion's share of Booty might be lost to time. The pirate's open mouthed smile holds no answers. The gold rush is over, but folks keep going to the river to pan. They come not for wealth but for a sense of belonging and association, retroactively attaching themselves to those mythical quantities of gold.
So too our store-brand Gaston, eyepatch and parrot in tow. He may not be a pirate, and his booty may be an insubstantial corn puff, but the ghost of privateers are restless and easy to call forth. Stare at his moustache, listen to his lipless yawn. "Yar," he says.
That "Yar" makes no promises. It is an unqualified Yes, a yes to the smiling child at the Coney Island fair, a yes to the office worker thumbing quarters into a vending machine, a yes to the cheese-powder mess we make of life. These worthless, unbankable puffs are Booty enough. "Yar," say we all, as we crunch them into oblivion.
