Snack
Small bites, big history: the world of snacks from street vendors to packaged treats.
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A snack is a small amount of food eaten between main meals. They can be store-bought packaged items, other processed foods, or homemade creations from fresh ingredients. People often make snacks at home using common items like cold cuts, fruit, leftovers, nuts, or sweets, with little preparation needed.
As convenience stores spread, selling packaged snacks turned into a very profitable business. These snack foods are made to be easy to carry, quick to eat, and filling. Compared to regular prepared foods, processed snacks are less likely to spoil, last longer, and travel better.
They usually include plenty of sweeteners, preservatives, and tempting ingredients like chocolate, peanuts, or special flavors such as those found in flavored potato chips. Good packaging that keeps the food fresh without spoiling is also key to selling them. A snack eaten just before bed or during the night might be called a bedtime snack, late night snack, or midnight snack.
Quick Facts
- Definition
- Small portion of food eaten between meals
- Common forms
- Packaged snack foods
- processed foods
- fresh homemade items
- Traditional ingredients
- Cold cuts
- fruits
- leftovers
- nuts
- sweets
- Key commercial feature
- Portable
- quick
- satisfying
- less perishable
- Notable regional examples
- Ketchup chips (Canada), peanuts (US), hummus (Middle East), Senbei (Japan)
- Global market context
- Nuts market valued at 119 billion dollars as of 2022
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
In the United States, a popular snack food is the peanut. Peanuts first arrived from South America via slave ships and became incorporated into African-inspired cooking on southern plantations. After the Civil War, the taste for peanuts spread north, where they were incorporated into the culture of such popular events as baseball games and vaudeville theaters.
Along with popcorn (also of South American origin), snacks bore the stigma of being sold by unhygienic street vendors. The middle-class etiquette of the Victorian era (1837–1901) categorized any food that did not require proper usage of utensils as lower-class. Pretzels were introduced to North America by the Dutch, via New Amsterdam in the 17th century. In the 1860s, the snack was still associated with immigrants, unhygienic street vendors, and saloons.
Due to loss of business during the Prohibition era (1920–1933), pretzels underwent rebranding to make them more appealing to the public. As packaging revolutionized snack foods, allowing sellers to reduce contamination risk, while making it easy to advertise brands with a logo, pretzels boomed in popularity, bringing many other types of snack foods with it. By the 1950s, snacking had become an all-American pastime, becoming an internationally recognized emblem of middle American life.
Reader's Guide
Government bodies, such as Health Canada, recommend that people make a conscious effort to eat more healthy, natural snacks, such as fruit, vegetables, nuts, and cereal grains while avoiding high-calorie, low-nutrient junk food. A 2010 study showed that children in the United States snacked on average six times per day, approximately twice as often as American children in the 1970s. This represents consumption of roughly 570 calories more per day than U.S. children consumed in the 1970s.
Did You Know?
- In Canada, some snacks include ketchup chips, Smarties, Coffee Crisp, Kinder Surprise, Jos Louis, Big Turk, and Nanaimo bars.
- In the Middle East, popular nuts for snacking include almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, and pistachios.
- Hummus, a popular Middle Eastern dip, traces its origins back to a Syrian cookbook from the 13th century.
- In Japan, rice-based snacks like Senbei and Mochi have been part of traditional food culture for centuries.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Snack (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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