EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Crisp flavours

This longread from last year is a delight, especially if you’re a big fan of crisps. And really, who isn’t?

(The Guardian, approx 10 mins reading time)

In an October 1955 issue of a US industry magazine called Potato Chipper, “Bar-B-Q” flavouring was described as “the most sensational new development in the industry”. The excitement around the new possibilities was palpable. In a later issue, an X-ray nurse from Cincinnati was crowned “Miss Potato Chip of 1956” (“She is five feet eight inches, blonde, and weighs 125 pounds,” declared the magazine). Pete Cardy, a 63-year-old from Hertfordshire, recalls visiting the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in London as a child in the 60s and seeing a vendor selling smoky bacon crisps. “It really blew my mind,” he says of sampling the snack. “It was: ‘Wow,’ it was just so exotic.”

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>