Well, I finally bought my Halloween goodies. Turns out, my best choice to avoid the top 8 allergens was simple enough – good old-fashioned Lays plain salted potato chips.

Now, these treats are not certified gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free or any other free, but the list of ingredients says it all: potatoes, vegetable oil (may contain one of more of the following: corn oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil), salt.

That’s it!

While I looked at all the fancy “allergy” labels for Halloween goodies, I just could not swallow the price. In order to feed the hoards of kids that arrive at my door, I would have shelled out over $100. (We typically get between 80-100 trick or treaters every year.) For the same number of 16 gram bags of potato chips, I coughed up a whole $12 plus tax.

While I understand that companies who put in place specialized safeguards for the allergic often have corresponding higher prices, I just can’t buy that the costs have to go through the roof. What happened to simple foods, simply made? When did it become necessary to have an ingredient list as long as most phone books in order to prove that you’ve really got something?

Personally, I find that the best foods have ingredient lists that I can read without a chemical dictionary close at hand, from things that I could buy at any local store myself. When we get into “sorghum flour” and “sodium alginate”, I’m thinking quickly that this food might not really be food anymore. It’s just been processed too much.

In fact, I heard from a farmer that sorghum is a crop that is used to let a field be fallow and he would never feed it to humans – only cattle.

Which brings me back to my Halloween potato chips: they aren’t organic (their one major flaw); they aren’t fancy; they aren’t expensive. But they’ll do just fine for one night of the year.