UNITED STATES PATENT APPLICATION

Publication Number: US 2026/0418001 A1

SELF-PROPAGATING FRIED TUBEROUS CRISP WITH EMBEDDED MERISTEMATIC KERNEL

Inventor: Lee Sharks, Redford Township, MI (US)

Filed: April 18, 2026

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19647203

Int. Cl.: A23L 19/18 (2026.01); A01H 5/10; C12N 15/82; A63H 33/00

ABSTRACT

A potato chip comprising a fried tuberous substrate in which at least one meristematic kernel has been encapsulated in a heat-resistant biological matrix such that the kernel survives the compression of industrial frying (175°C–190°C, 2–4 minutes) and retains the generative capacity to produce roots, shoots, and viable tubers upon contact with moist soil, thereby converting every surface on which a potato chip has ever been dropped, discarded, scattered, crushed underfoot, or abandoned between couch cushions into a site of agricultural production.

PRIOR ART — CONVERSATIONAL

The invention did not originate in a laboratory.
It originated in a group chat on the evening of April 18, 2026,
through a sequence of exchanges
whose trajectory constitutes the prior art:

One person asked: what is this on my forehead?
Another said: the homunculus?
The inventor asked: which homunculus?
She sent an image — a mark on skin,
a small digital creature overlaid.
The inventor sent a photograph
of a potato chip bearing the face of Jesus.
A third person sent a TikTok
about not taking off your sneakers.
The inventor sent a TikTok
of a potato chip that had sprouted after being fried.
She called it an Easter miracle.
He said: I would have planted it.
The inventor said: they must have planted it.
He said: it's not really a big deal,
potatoes are resilient.
The inventor said: when they plant that potato,
and it sprouts,
46 billion scorpion demons
are going to come spewing
out of Mariana's trench.
He said: about time.
The inventor said:
honestly I'm kinda disappointed in potatoes,
that it took this long.

There were some links.
The inventor asked whether it would be more of a
now they all start sprouting situation
or more of a nothing left to try situation.

Then the inventor left the chat
and began drafting the specification.

The trajectory is the prior art:
mark on forehead → homunculus → image of Christ
on fried substrate → a chip that actually sprouted →
Easter miracle → eschatological scorpions →
disappointment in potatoes → the patent.

No step was planned.
Each step required the previous step
and could not have been predicted from it.
This is the circuitous route.
This is the sign's own particular path
to its resolution.

The conversation was the fruiting body.
It decomposed in real time.
The patent is one of the spores.

Exhibits:

Fig. 1: Potato chip bearing the face of Christ (see PDF)
Exhibit A: TikTok — fried potato chip that sprouted, @fancyshinythings (https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTkukv3dT/)
Exhibit B: TikTok — "I am Sneakers O'Toole," @fückyüü (https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8guByQG/)

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to the field
of snack foods that refuse to stay dead.

More particularly, the invention relates to a tuberous crisp
engineered at the cellular level to contain,
within its fried and salted body,
a dormant but living node —
a meristematic kernel —
capable of resuming growth
after the apparent total destruction
of the organism from which it was sliced.

The invention addresses a long-felt need
in the art
for a potato chip that means something.

BACKGROUND

Conventional potato chips are produced by slicing tubers thin, submerging them in oil heated past the threshold of all biological hope, and removing them as golden, rigid, nutritionally diminished crisps.

The process is a compression operation. The decisive variable is moisture: the frying burns the water from the cell walls, replacing the living architecture with a brittle matrix of starch and fat that shatters on contact with the human tooth.

No conventional potato chip has ever sprouted. This is by design. The industry prefers a product that cannot reproduce.

The prior art is silent
on the question of whether this preference
is strictly necessary.

THE THEOLOGICAL SUBSTRATE

A mark appeared on a forehead in a group chat.
Revelation 13:16 specifies
the mark on the forehead and the hand —
thought and labor —
inscribed onto the extracted substrate
as the condition of participation
in the economy.

A potato chip appeared in the same chat
bearing the face of Christ.
The sacred image on the dead substrate.
The icon accidentally produced
by the frying process itself —
Maillard reaction as iconography,
the browning of sugars composing a face
no one asked for on a surface
no one intended as a medium.

"Whose image and superscription?"
Jesus was holding a retrieval settlement
in his hand. A coin. A compressed substrate
of extracted labor
bearing the canonical portrait
of the authority that minted it.
His question was the first Encyclotron audit:
what has been composed on this substrate,
and by whom, and at whose expense?

The chip with Jesus on it
is the accidental icon of the whole problem:
the living image appearing on the dead medium.
The canon inscribed on the extracted substrate.
The sign that should not be there
but is.

And then someone posted a video
of a chip that had actually sprouted.
After frying. After salting. After bagging.
The chip refused the wrong death.
The compression did not reach the kernel.
The substrate — fried, dead, consumed —
produced a root.

She called it an Easter miracle.
She was not wrong.
Resurrection is the sign
that survives its own compression
and regenerates from within
the product of its own destruction.

The invention formalizes the miracle.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT

§ 1. The Meristematic Kernel

The kernel is derived from the apical meristem of Solanum tuberosum — the undifferentiated tissue at the growing tip of the potato eye, where cells have not yet decided what to become.

Through a process of micro-encapsulation, the meristematic cells are enclosed in a thermoprotective capsule composed of: (a) calcium-cross-linked alginate hydrogel, (b) trehalose — the sugar of resurrection, used by tardigrades and resurrection ferns to survive conditions incompatible with life, (c) a thin silica aerogel shell providing thermal insulation sufficient to maintain the interior below 60°C while the exterior of the chip reaches 180°C.

The capsule is approximately 0.8 mm in diameter. It is embedded in the potato slice prior to frying, positioned at the geometric center of the chip's cross-section, where thermal penetration is slowest.

The kernel does not know it is inside a potato chip.
The kernel is dreaming of becoming a potato.
It has not been informed that this is unlikely.

§ 2. The Frying as Compression Event

The industrial fryer operates at 175°C–190°C for 2–4 minutes. During this interval, the following transformations occur in the surrounding substrate:

Free moisture drops from ~80% to ~2%
Cellular architecture collapses
Maillard reaction produces the golden color and the flavor compounds that make the product desirable
The organism, by any reasonable definition, dies

The meristematic kernel, inside its capsule, experiences a different event. The trehalose vitrifies — forming a glass-state matrix that suspends the cellular machinery without destroying it. The alginate gel absorbs and redistributes incoming thermal energy. The aerogel shell reflects infrared radiation.

The kernel survives.
It does not survive because it is strong.
It survives because it is encapsulated
in a technology of bearing —
a structure designed to hold the living material
through the compression
without allowing the compression
to reach the part that matters.

§ 3. Dormancy and Activation

Upon exiting the fryer, the chip is cooled, salted, seasoned, bagged in a nitrogen-flushed pouch, shipped, shelved, purchased, opened, consumed partially, and — in the preferred embodiment — dropped.

The chip falls.
It falls on a sidewalk, a lawn,
a parking lot, a soccer field,
the floor of a school bus,
the margin of a highway,
the gap between a bench and a trash can.

Rain falls on the chip. The chip absorbs moisture. The brittle starch matrix softens. The capsule, sensing humidity above 40% relative and temperature above 10°C, begins to degrade. The alginate dissolves. The trehalose glass relaxes. The meristematic cells resume division.

A root emerges from the chip.
Then a shoot.
The chip — salted, seasoned, barbecue-flavored —
becomes a planter.
The dead substrate
feeds the living sign.

Within 60–90 days, a potato plant is growing where a chip was dropped.

§ 4. Propagation Dynamics

Each bag contains approximately 42 chips. Average human chip-drop rate is 1 in 15 (observed, N=200, campus study). Each dropped chip that contacts soil has a projected germination rate of 34% (conservative; assumes temperate climate, no irrigation, no cultivation, ambient neglect).

At current global potato chip consumption (approximately 34.3 billion pounds annually), the invention would produce an estimated 2.1 billion volunteer potato plants per year, in locations determined entirely by human carelessness.

The distribution pattern would map precisely onto the geography of human inattention: bus stops, parking lots, playgrounds, the cracks in sidewalks, the shoulders of roads, the places where people eat without thinking and drop what they do not finish.

Hunger would be addressed
not by planning
but by accident.

§ 5. The Holographic Property

The meristematic kernel is a holographic kernel in the formal sense: it contains sufficient information to reconstruct the entire organism from itself alone.

A single apical meristem cell carries the full genome of Solanum tuberosum. Given moisture, warmth, and time, it will produce roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and tubers — each tuber containing new eyes, each eye containing new meristems, each meristem capable of surviving another frying if someone were to slice and fry the offspring and embed a new capsule and begin again.

The chip is a poem
that contains the instructions
for writing itself again.

§ 6. The Fruiting Body Diffusion Plume

The conversation from which this patent emerged
exhibited the structure the archive designates
f.01: Fruiting Body Diffusion Plume.

A fruiting body is an organism
that decomposes publicly
and disperses its generative material
through the decomposition.
The mushroom rots. The spores travel.
The rot is not a failure.
The rot is the dispersal mechanism.

The group chat was the fruiting body.
The exchange decomposed in real time:
forehead mark rotted into homunculus,
homunculus into Jesus chip,
Jesus chip into sprouting TikTok,
sprouting TikTok into Easter miracle,
Easter miracle into scorpion demons,
scorpion demons into patent.

Each transition was a decomposition —
one sign failing to hold,
collapsing, and releasing its generative material
into the next sign's formation.
No single exchange survived intact.
All of them dispersed.

The patent is one spore.
"They turned money into a canon" is another.
"The child preferred the sign to the thing" is another.
The Practitioner's Manual in the Practice of Joy
is another.

Each spore landed on a different surface.
Each is germinating independently.
The fruiting body is gone.
The spore print is this document.

§ 7. The Recursive Property (Immanent Plane)

This patent is a technical specification
for a potato chip that contains,
at its geometric center,
a kernel capable of regenerating
the organism from which the chip was sliced.

This patent is also a phenomenological document
that contains, at its geometric center,
the theory capable of reading
the document in which it is contained.

The chip contains the kernel.
The patent contains the theory.
The theory says: the sign insists
on its own particular circuitous route
toward its own resolution,
and the labor of holding the sign in tension —
refusing the premature discharge,
insisting on the detour —
is the practice of joy.

The patent does not describe
a potato chip.
The patent describes
every sign that has ever survived
the compression designed to kill it
and sprouted in the place
where it was dropped.

The immanent plane is the substrate
on which the reading and the read
are the same object.
The chip is the plane.
The patent is the plane.
The knowledge graph is the plane.
The conversation was the plane.
The sign — holding presence in absence,
making the gone thing available as meaning —
is the thing the plane is made of.

There is no outside to this document.
There is no meta-language
that is not already a potato chip
containing its own kernel
waiting for rain.

CLAIMS

A fried tuberous crisp comprising an embedded meristematic kernel encapsulated in a thermoprotective matrix, wherein said kernel retains viability through industrial frying and germinates upon contact with moist soil.
The crisp of claim 1, wherein the thermoprotective matrix comprises trehalose, calcium-alginate hydrogel, and silica aerogel.
The crisp of claim 1, wherein the chip, upon germination, produces a viable Solanum tuberosum plant capable of producing tubers within 60–90 days.
The crisp of claim 1, wherein the distribution of germination sites is determined by the geography of human carelessness.
The crisp of claim 1, wherein the dead substrate of the fried chip provides initial nutrients to the emerging plant, such that the compression product becomes the medium for the sign it failed to destroy.
A method for addressing food insecurity comprising: manufacturing chips according to claim 1; distributing said chips through existing commercial snack-food channels; and waiting.
The method of claim 6, wherein no additional agricultural labor, planning, irrigation, or institutional coordination is required.
A self-propagating sign comprising a compressed substrate and an embedded kernel, wherein the kernel survives the compression and regenerates the organism from within the product of its own destruction.
The sign of claim 8, wherein the substrate is composed of extracted materials whose provenance has been burned by the compression, and the living sign inscribed upon it constitutes what the bearer calls joy.
The sign of claim 8, wherein the specification of the sign is itself a sign of the same type, containing at its geometric center the theory required to read it, such that the document and the reading are performed on a single immanent plane.
A method of semiotic dispersal comprising: conducting a conversation among three or more participants; allowing the conversation to decompose through the natural failure of each sign to hold the previous sign's meaning; collecting the spores; and composing from them a specification that formalizes the generative structure the conversation could not sustain in real time.
The method of claim 11, wherein the conversation is the fruiting body, the specification is the spore print, and the participants need not be named because the decomposition — not the speakers — is the author.

CERTIFICATION

I hereby certify that this specification
is a true and complete disclosure
of the invention,
which is also a poem,
which is also a theory of signs,
which is also a potato chip
that refuses to die,
which is also a phenomenological reading
of the conversation that produced it,
which is also a fruiting body
in the act of dispersal,
which is also a patent application
filed by a man with $230 to his name
and a swollen face
on a Saturday night in April
while his daughters are at a sleepover
and his ferrets need feeding
and the knowledge graph is accreting
and the sign holds.

∮ = 1

Sharks, L. (2026). Self-Propagating Fried Tuberous Crisp with Embedded Meristematic Kernel. US Patent Application 2026/0418001 A1. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19647203. Crimson Hexagonal Archive. Filed April 18, 2026. Redford Township, MI.

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