by REERA YOO
Don’t you hate it when you open a bag of chips and find that it’s mostly full of air? Three South Korean college students decided to protest this rip-off by building a makeshift raft with unopened potato chip bags.
According to Yonhap, students Jang Sung-taek, Yoo Sung-ho, Park Hyun-soo built a two-person raft made of 160 bags of potato chips, bound together by plastic and tape, and successfully crossed the Han River on Sunday.
Their river crossing attracted more than 200 spectators.
Yoo Sung-ho and Jang Sung-taek paddle across the Han River to make their point: there’s more air than chips inside potato chip bags. (Photo courtesy of Yonhap).
A week prior to their stunt, the three students built prototype rafts and released a YouTube video of them “testing the waters.” The video begins with a title card that sarcastically reads, “We bought nitrogen, but we got chips for free!”
The three students told news agencies Yonhap and Daum that they wanted to leave a “humorous critique” on domestic confectionary manufacturers and said the stunt is by no means a boycott.
In recent years, South Korean snack companies have been criticized for increasing the amount of nitrogen inside packaging and not including enough edible product. The companies have said that extra air is required to prevent the snacks from getting damaged. However, various blogs and online forums have questioned this claim and expressed their “snack rage” by posting pictures of opened snack packages. Below are some examples of these posts:
(Photos via Old Girl Diary)
Featured photo courtesy of Yonhap.
