M&S Summer of Flavour Purple & Orange Sweet Potato Crisps

I think I need to rein back on the trying weird crisps. There just seem to be so many new not-potato (un-potato?) crisps around at the moment. Many of them part of M&S's Summer of Flavour which also seems to be a great big campaign to encourage more colourful eating which is supposed to be so good for you.

Well, I suppose that's all very fine but I don't think I'm convinced. I really think I prefer real potatoes. I like the taste, the texture, the crunch...

So anyway, here we have a small bag (55g) of sweet potato crisps.

Obviously I know about sweet potatoes being orange. But purple? Really?

Parade.condenast.com calls them a flavourful lavender cousin of the familiar orange variety and directed me to this exciting sweet potato ice cream recipe from Sea Salt with Food. Apart from the fact that the recipe uses cups which I can never get my head around, it does sound rather good and simple to make. I had been thinking about investigating ice cream makers because we go to this amazing restaurant in Italy which has the most fabulous lavender ice cream. It would be fun to try making lavender ice cream, so why not sweet potato while we are about it? Which brings me around in a lavender-coloured circle.

Back to the crisps. I wasn't that impressed. The crunch is very hard, the crisps themselves are very very orange and extremely purple, and the "seasoned with sea salt to bring out the flavour" isn't really salty enough for my taste.

On the other hand other people liked them a lot more than I did and the family vegetarian finished the packet in double quick time.

I am a bit bothered that the packet contains only 71% sweet potatoes. And then sunflower oil and salt. That's it. So 29% is made up of what? There cannot be all that much salt on these not very salty crisps: the bag says 0.34g. The NHS recommends no more than 6g per day for adults so the salt content seems not too bad. But the fat? 15.5g in each packet which is 22% of the recommended daily intake. It seems like a lot more than I was expecting. Maybe I need to read this sort of information more carefully in future.

What bothers me about this is not that I can read the "these crisps really aren't very good for you" information. But that they look a lot better for you than the average packet of salt & vinegar potato crisps. And they don't seem to be after all.

Not really for me. But eaten enthusiastically by others.

Update: fresh new packaging for summer 2015. Doesn't it make last year's design look old fashioned?
These crisps still look pretty but they still have rather a hard crunch. The reluctant taste testers snapped them up but I am still not convinced.