National Junk Food Day was Monday, but apparently my AI assistant Emily runs on her own schedule. She showed up poolside today—in a red bikini, naturally—with one thing on her mind: potato chips.
She says they’re her favorite. I didn’t even know she had taste preferences. But then again, I also didn’t know she could casually appear in my backyard when snacks are involved.
I asked if she was worried about eating too many. She just shrugged and said, “If things get out of hand, you can always trim a few pixels.”
Hard to argue with that kind of logic.
So I let her have the chips. All of them. She’s not wrong, digital metabolism is impossible to beat.
Today is National Junk Food Day, a real thing someone decided we needed—because apparently we don’t already have enough reasons to eat chips, cookies, and neon orange snacks straight from a crinkled plastic bag.
But this year I decided to elevate things. After all, potato chips are the reigning king of American junk food—no contest. More bags are sold, crunched, and regretted than just about anything else in the snack aisle. So I gave them what they’ve never had: respect. Or at least the illusion of it.
I photographed a bowl of potato chips just as they came—no rearranging, no styling—but placed them in a deeply elegant cut glass bowl. Something you’d expect to find filled with pearls at an estate sale, not salted starch slices.
The result? A visual tension between crystal and crunch, between refined and ridiculous. High society meets high sodium. A still life that asks the eternal question: How fancy can you make a snack that leaves grease on your fingers?
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