Pork scratchings used to be what happened when you refused to waste the pig. The skin came off with fat still attached, it got salted, cooked hard and eaten. Nothing clever. Nothing branded as a protein snack. Just another part of the animal being used. That is still what proper pork scratchings basically are: pork rind, fat and salt. It’s funny how modern food culture treats them. A bag of crisps made from potato, starch, flavourings and vegetable oil can sit in the snack aisle without anyone blinking, but pork skin cooked in its own fat gets treated like some guilty pub food relic. And nutritionally they are not the same thing at all. Pork scratchings are mostly protein and fat, with very little carbohydrate. The protein comes largely from collagen-rich skin, so it is heavy in amino acids like glycine and proline rather than being the same as a steak or egg. Some modern versions are still very simple. Others are not. Once you start adding seed oils, sugar, starches, flavour coatings and whatever else the factory thought would help, you have moved a long way from the old idea of using the whole pig. That is the bit I like. Not that pork scratchings are some perfect health food. Just that one of the oldest ways of wasting less of the animal somehow ended up being treated as the naughty option.