Shake Shack fries

The fries at Shake Shack are what I hoped Micro Magic fries would taste like, in my boyhood:

Anybody ever eat things?  The packaging was attractive.  They fooled me quite a few times.

Perhaps they failed in attempting to live up to an idea of a “fry.”  A fry is firm, and Micro Magic just couldn’t get there.  But they were making a salty mushed potato product that might’ve been attractive on its own terms.

A taxonomy error, perhaps.

Google led me to that image of Micro Magic fries on the website of New Adult Contemporary Romance author Jennifer Friess (don’t know if it’s a coincidence that her name is fries)

There was really a period there where the expectations put on the microwave were insane.  Supermarkets were full of hallucinatory projections of what was gonna come out of the microwave.