Hedgehog-Flavored Crisps

In 1981, Philip Lewis, a public-house owner in Wales, decided to carry the practice [of adding flavorings to potato chips] to its absurd extreme. As a joke, he yielded to the requests of some customers at this Welshpool establishment, The Vaults, and began to sell what he said were hedgehog-flavored crisps.

All Lewis did was to toss a few herbs and some pork fat into a batch of crisps and call the new flavor hedgehog. Because few of his customers had ever dined on hedgehog, they were happy to accept the new taste sensation as being reasonably accurate.

At this point, the members of the local county council moved to squelch this unconscionable fraud upon consumers. Authorities analyzed the crisps, found no trace of hedgehog, and warned Lewis he was engaging in false advertising.

Lewis tossed the ball to chemists at Wolverhamptom Polytechnic, who went to work to find something that tasted enough like hedgehog to satisfy the council members. A settlement was ultimately reached after Lewis interviewed some customers who had actually eaten hedgehogs.

"We have some old Gypsies in Welshpool who used to eat baked hedgehogs, and they have told me the flavor is somewhere between veal and pork," Lewis explained at the time.

Thereafter, Lewis managed to have the flavor approximately reproduced. He billed the new crisps as "hedgehog flavor" rather than "hedgehog flavored" and business boomed.