Court Rules Pringles are Chip Off the Old Potato After All

You may remember we blogged the complicating and boring ruling by a British taxing authority that Pringles were not potato chips just because they weren't made out of at least 50 % potatoes.

Now that ruling has been reversed. While you may have thought Pringles were made out of the fuzz off of old tennis balls just because they came in a can that looked like it contained tennis balls and, and because they tasted like that, too you'd be wrong as a matter of law.

The issue before the court was whether the potato chips (called crisps in England of course, because chips are French fries in England and a car trunk is a boot, and an elevator is a lift. So if you're staying in an apartment in Neuveau-Riche-on Avon and some chap offers to come in your flat lift with chips from his boot and his spotted dick to knock you up, don't tell him to bugger off, it isn't necessarily an indecent proposal because England and America are two peoples separated by a common language. There are words in common between Britishisms and Americanisms, but not meanings. You can look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. ) were "made from potatoes."

Specifically, they are made from potato flour, corn flour, wheat starch and rice flour together with fat and emulsifier, salt and seasoning, with a potato content of about 42%. They are more non-potato than they are potato, a half breed chip off the old ?????

Mr. Pringle, to his everlasting shame, argued they are not taxable because they are not really made primarily from potatoes; and were made to melt in your mouth rather than crunch. Lacking both potato and tactile crunchiness they could not be potato chips, Q. C. Pringle argued. Just because they taste like potato, are shaped like a potato chips, are deep fried and have salt on them like potato chips, and most people think the are made from potatoes, that is no reason to tax them as if they were potato chips. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, but it's only 42% duck-- may be it's not a duck after all! After all, Lincoln never said "If it quacks like a duck, it's taxed like a duck." The Federal Court of Appeals once held that duck's eggs were not the eggs of birds after all.

Mr. Pringle (the egotistical man who insisted on putting his visage on each can) did it to save dough--up to 100 million pounds in tax, and that is some heavy dough.

It was argued that Regular Pringles, which also contain fat and flour, cannot be said to be "made from the potato." However, the court ruled that they were made from a potato in the common sense meaning of the term if not the technical scientific sense. "You can't make a Silk Purse out of a Sow's Ear," Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) said, but a silk purse could be taxes as "made from sow's ears" under this court's definition, if a sow's ear was one of the ingredients.

By the way, Swift was proven incorrect by Arthur D. Little. In 1921, after hearing someone quote Jonathan Swift's adage, "You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear," Little decided to try to do just that. From a meat-packer he obtained a form of glue made from the skin and gristle of sows' ears. "Taking an amount roughly equivalent to one sow's ear, he had it filtered and forced through a spinneret into a mixture of formaldehyde and acetone. The glue emerged as 16 fine, colorless streams that hardened and then combined to form a single composite fiber. Little soaked the fiber in dyed glycerin. Then he wove the resulting thread into cloth on a hand loom-and fashioned the cloth into an elegant purse -- the kind of item carried by ladies of the Middle Ages. "

So you can stuff a tennis ball container with fried, salted dough, and try to avoid the taxes if you've got the balls, but game set and match to Inland Revenue. And Her Majesty's government rests its case (of Pringles).