McCain Smiles

Potatoes continue to be grown and shipped by the ginormous truckload. These all-American tubers are numerous, dirt-cheap, and as omnipresent as the air we breathe, if somewhat starchier. But the french fry market is moribund as ever, so major corporations keep struggling to find new ways to sell them.

McCain Foods presents the latest attempt to make us choke down the tiresome tuber: Smiles.

The first important thing to note about Smiles is that if you request a review package, they come packed with an enormous slab of dry ice. For readers who didn't play around with this stuff in middle school, here's the word on the street: Dry ice is awesome. Just be sure to handle it with protective gloves.

If you put dry ice into your sink, it fogs out into a funked-up witches' brew, like this:

And, yes, have no fear: It'll fill the tub, too! Good God!

What if you put dry ice into a small plastic cup? Scientists report: It's still totally fun.

Moreover, it keeps two 28 oz. packages of frozen potatoes totally frozen, even if they've sat on a porch in Cambridge all day.

But regardless of whether you get your Smiles via UPS or from the freezer of your local grocer, you're bound to notice they're trying to win over young people considerably harder than the majority of potato products out there. This same note of desperation is echoed on the unintentionally hilarious McCain Foods Xtreme Fries website, a stumbling attempt at youth demographic relevance that makes Poochie seem to pulse with edgy street cred by comparison.

Demographic confusion aside, Smiles are remarkably easy to prepare and relatively palatable when served with ketchup. Four to five minutes at 450 degrees, flip, cook for a couple minutes more, and you've got a plate of weird, crispy-on-the-outside, creamy-on-the-inside potato faces. And they're always in a good mood.

A dining companion declared that eating a Smile was much like eating a computer icon, an experience that was declared "creepy." But this — and the fact that Smiles were deemed inferior to the rough-and-ready taste of Tater Tots — didn't stop her from consuming at least a half-dozen of the starchy snacks.

Ultimately, they're tasty. Aesthetic questions aside, the ghoulishly regular happy-face holes drilled into every Smile ensure that each one has a much larger amount of surface area than an equivalently sized coin-shaped potato product. The result? More crispy skin to enjoy.

Pub fries have nothing to fear. But for those questing for the latest iteration of the same old tuber, Smiles have your number.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)