You sir, you, should write a letter to somebody sitting in a chair in their office in some ivory tower making margins off of the air in your cheetos bag, those bastards!
In 2017, sales of Cheetos exceeded $1 billion dollars, which was more than 5 times the
combined sales figures of its next 9 competitors in the cheese snack food category. But the original cheese snack product was Cheese Doodles.
To help take some of the sting out of snack food bags that are disappoint us by being less full than we expect, I offer a couple of anecdotal tidbits directly from the "man behind the snack," and his wife who was notably less modest in telling tales about the famous product. But first, some background:
en.wikipedia.org
Sometime in the first few years of the new millennium, I was invited to join a dear friend for Friday night services at her temple. There was some aspect of the evening that related to or honored the Saturday morning Torah study group that she attended, and from which she would regularly share very accessible and generally excellent poetry that was written and distributed by one of her cohorts. He was a slightly-built older man man with a wispy ponytail that was always collected within a thin rubber band.
As was custom, there was a social reception afterward, with wine, crudite, and sweets, and I found myself in conversation with an petite, elegant, and highly animated mature woman named Phyllis, who eventually came around to telling me she was married to the poet. Before long, she moved the conversation forward, by offering in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, "Morris would kill me if he knew I told you, but he invented the Cheese Doodle."
The Wikipedia article above, and the NYTimes obit that served as a major reference source, emphasized that Morrie was modest about his credit for the product, but willing to claim having come up with the name. Phyllis, without any prompting or her husband's watchful eye, told me that the name "doodle" was actually an acceptable (and more playful) reworking of pluralized children's slang word for poop, "doodies." At the time of product creation, when the extruded cheese form emerged from the machinery that created it, there was instant & delighted recognition that its shape and size resembled the feces of a small dog.
Morrie, a naturally shy man, had an even better story, which he told me after seeing me a few times and apparently deciding that I was OK to talk with. He'd grown up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium, which he would visit often. When he showd up one day on a new bicycle, Morrie was hailed down at the perimeter of the stadium. The man who admired his bicycle said, "Hey kid, can I ride your bicycle?," and then proceeded to spin around the broad areas where fans would congregate before entering the facility. He performed all kinds of tricks, including wheelies, hands-free, standing up, and when he was finished he offered appreciative thanks for the fun he'd had. And yes, that joyous overgrown kid was George Herman Ruth.