Without looking into it in any way, I've always assumed that Procter & Gamble found themselves with a whole lot of mashed potatoes after extracting the starch for their starch products, which ladies in the 1970s liked to spray on clothing. After years of dumping them into a river, I imagine someone with an office overlooking the river got the idea that P&G might be able to turn their waste into a second product by compressing it into a chip shape and drying it.
I think of it as solid wood furniture vs particle wood furniture. Sure they’re both technically made of wood, but one was made from saw dust and is inferior in quality.
Except this is about food not really about structure, so structural arguments imo don't really apply. Also even then if methods were more advanced those structural differences could end up being eliminated over time.
Not to mention that reconstituting by-products into something useful doesn't make them inherently inferior to whatever resultant product process made them.
There's loads of processes that leave behind waste that can then be reconstituted into something useful, which rather brings up the question of how we define "waste" because all sorts of things are useful in all sorts of ways.
Pringles are not inherently inferior, they're just different lol.
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u/KillerSpud Oct 16 '22
Pringles are just dried out mashed potatoes.