‘Salad-flavoured’?

If you have a chance to buy Japanese snacks, you might see that some chips or crackers advertise themselves as ‘salad-flavoured’ (サラダ味, sarada aji).

Does it mean they taste of lettuce…?
The answer is: no.
Such snacks are only flavoured with salad oil and salt, so the taste is nowhere near as extravagant as you might have expected it to be. A certain manufacturer came up with ‘salad flavour’ in the 1960s, because they thought it sounds cooler than ‘salt flavour’, and that’s the whole mystery. 😉

Written by Amelia Lipko