RIP - Inventor of tortilla chip (Rebecca Webb Carranza, 98)

[DBoon]

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-carranza7feb07,0,3813969.story?coll=la-home-headlines

The headline in Popular Mechanics magazine saluted a manufacturing triumph in Los Angeles: "Tortillas Meet the Machine Age." It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years.

Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out "bent" or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.

For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them. A hit with the relatives, the chips soon sold for a dime a bag at her Mexican delicatessen and factory at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue in southwest Los Angeles.

By the 1960s, the snack the family packaged as Tort Chips and delivered up and down the coast had evolved into El Zarape's primary business.

Every one of you who attended a superbowl party owes a debt of gratitude.

Now who was the inventor of guacamole?

[LaraMN]

1. A personal hero of mine, for certain,

considering my chips and salsa fixation. RIP, Ms. Caranza.