How Snacks Took Over American Life
8 min read
There was a time, if you can believe it, when a respectable person could not have a little treat whenever she wanted. This time was, roughly, from the dawn of the republic to the middle of the 1980s. The American workday, menu, and social clock were oriented around meals, and eating between them was discouraged: If you were a child, snacking gave you cavities and spoiled your appetite; if you were an adult, it was kind of unseemly. There were no elaborate treats after soccer practice, or snack trays on strollers, or yogurts in tubes. Energy bars were for athletes, not accountants. National parks did not have vending machines. Grocery stores did not have aisles and aisles of portable abundance. The phrases girl dinner and new flavor drop were totally nonsensical, instead of just a bit nonsensical. Libraries, classrooms, cubicles, and theaters were, generally, where you read, learned, worked, and saw La bohème—but definitely did not eat.
Some 40 years later, we are not just eating between meals; we are abandoning them entirely. In the three decades leading up to 2008, the average American doubled their daily snack intake, and the percentage of adults snacking on any given day rose from 59 percent to 90 percent, according to a comprehensive government report. In the most recent iteration of the same study, which ended in 2020 before the pandemic, that number rose again, to 95 percent; more than half of respondents said they consumed at least three snacks a day. According to a survey released earlier this year by the international snack-food conglomerate Mondelēz International, in conjunction with the Harris Poll, six in 10 consumers prefer snacking over traditional meals. The trend will probably persist: Younger people are significantly more likely than older ones to report skipping meals, choosing instead to cobble together a day’s worth of sustenance piece by piece, away from the table.
“Snacks won,” Andrea Hernández, a trend forecaster who runs a Substack newsletter about the topic, told me. “Our parents used to tell us, ‘Don’t snack, or you’ll ruin the meal.’ And now the snack has become the whole meal.” Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, once our national metronome, have gone from expected to optional. America’s eating life has been reoriented under our nose, remolded for a world that is very different from how it used to be.
Snacking, and snack foods, have existed since long before the three-meal day came to dominate. But the moment we are living through can trace its origins to the late 1970s and early ’80s, when cultural and economic trends collided to kick off a snack boom that never abated. The Reagan administration loosened restrictions on television advertising, so cartoon characters could much more easily shill sugary cereals on Sunday mornings. New nutrition research and a recently fitness-crazed culture decided snacking was healthful and rebranded it “grazing.” The grocery industry consolidated, Janis Thiessen, a history professor at the University of Winnipeg, told me—which meant that stores once supplied by small, regional manufacturers were now working with national and international snack-food companies with bigger advertising budgets and generally lower prices.
At the same time, people began having less time to spend in the kitchen. Women, particularly married ones, joined the workforce in droves. Kids were more likely to be home alone after school, or, if they were wealthy, at one of the extracurricular activities that had sprung up to keep them occupied (and get them into college). Parents started encouraging snacking to ensure children ate enough during a day that had suddenly become busier for everyone. The car cup holder was introduced along with the minivan in 1983. Drive-throughs soared in popularity.
As American families traded time for money, the snack-food sector found new ways to meet their demands, “turning out new and more tempting products faster than ever,” as Abigail Carroll writes in Three Squares, her history of meals. In the 1960s and ’70s, about 250 new high-calorie snack foods were added to shelves every year; by the end of the ’80s that figure was closer to 2,000. By the mid-’90s, just about everything an American kid might make for herself after school had been snackified. Pizza bagels had become Bagel Bites, peanut-butter sandwiches had become Uncrustables, and packaged snacks had become an indelible symbol of childhood: “You go to other countries, and it’ll be like, ‘Oh, my comfort food is this soup my mom makes,’” Hernández said. “And for [American] Millennials, it’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, man, that Dunkaroos, that funfetti one?’”
When the children raised on snacks grew up, snacks became part of young adulthood. Companies—first in the young-skewing tech industry, and then in white-collar work more broadly—began providing employees with snacks as a perk. When my mother started her first office job, in the ’70s, eating at work was inappropriate; 50 years later, her daughter wrote much of this article in the company of a little ramekin of mini Reese’s Pieces, provided by her employer, which she ate out of the palm of her hand like a pigeon.
Every generation thinks it is the center of the universe. Millennials actually are, at least from a market-segmentation perspective. “We’re like the apex consumer right now,” Hernández said, speaking for her age group (and mine). We have disposable income and mouths to feed. We are old enough to eat whatever we want. We want snacks.
And we are still being pushed toward them, by a massive industrial mechanism with an existential interest in keeping us eating, all the time. Snack foods tend to be made with inexpensive ingredients (corn, soy, potatoes) and sold at a heavy markup. They are the cheap solution to a fundamental problem for the food industry: Companies are expected to grow, but human bodies can take in only so much. Snacks are designed by geniuses using advanced technology with the express intention of powering past our feelings of satiety and making us eat more. They are designed to be eaten anywhere and built using flavor and texture combinations that our basest neurological functions simply cannot get enough of: salt, fat, sweet, crunch, chew, cream. Nutrition science has a word for this, palatability, though in recent years, the field has been forced to invent a new one—hyper-palatability.
One way to get people to buy more food is to make it taste better. Another is to expand the rationale for eating in the first place—to turn it into something we do for fun, not just sustenance.This is where we are now. Thanks to developments in manufacturing and packaging, it’s never been cheaper to make new flavors of snacks, and thanks to social media, it’s never been more remunerative. Oreos were invented in 1912, and they remained more or less unsullied for decades; in the ’90s, the company might have released a limited-edition or Christmas flavor, to little fanfare, the snack historian Jason Liebig told me. This year so far, Mondelēz has released 12 new flavors. Each yields a wave of taste-test TikToks, Instagram posts, and coverage in an entertainment press that previously reserved such space for articles about movie releases and new albums. (Mondelēz’s revenues increased nearly 40 percent from 2018 to 2023.) We have entered the age of snacking as fandom, in which, as my colleague Megan Garber has written, “the abilities of the chemist collide with the demands of influencer culture.”
Snacks are everything we want to eat, and so everything is becoming snacks. John Harvey Kellogg was a Seventh-Day Adventist and a sanatorium doctor who thought that bland, sugar-free breakfast cereal could solve America’s ills. The company he co-founded in 1906 now makes the majority of its sales from highly processed, highly flavorful, highly sugary snacks; last month, Mars bought the snack-food division of Kellogg’s for $36 billion, the largest acquisition of the year so far. I recently came across a bag of pesto-flavored potato puffs billed as “pasta chips”—dinner quite literally refashioned into a snack. (“Pasta should be at your fingertips anytime, anywhere,” the copy on the back of the bag reads.) Olives, pickles, apples, salad, jam, and peanut butter have all been packaged in plastic and marketed as snacks: “You don’t need a table; you don’t need utensils; you just have it in your hand,” Hernández told me. “Everything … is now in this convenient format”—even stuff that wasn’t all that inconvenient to begin with.
The shift toward snacking reflects great disruptions in American life. It has also created them. In the time that snacks have taken over, cooking has declined further. The rules around food have become much more casual. We are much less likely to eat with other people—if we even have a dining table to eat at—and much more likely to eat in cars. Eating has become less deferential to propriety and more tuned to personal pleasure: Meals may require us to set the table, make concessions to what our companions want, and at least gesture at balance; snacks, generally, do not.
And all of the factors that facilitated snacks’ rise four decades ago have become only more pronounced. Americans are working longer hours than people in other developed countries. Kids are running from activity to activity. Robert Byrne, a market researcher at the food-service research and consulting company Technomic, told me that people are significantly more likely now than ever before to make food decisions based on feeling pressed for time. “People’s lives are so complicated,” Thiessen, the University of Winnipeg professor, told me. “Everyone has to cram eating in where they can.” And they have a much larger array of options to choose from when they do.
That doesn’t seem likely to change. “You cannot unlearn convenience,” Hernández said. You cannot un-grant what Carroll, the Three Squares author, calls the “inherently American … freedom to snack at whim,” or un-popularize what the internet calls “little-treat culture.” Snacks are ingrained in American life—in our brain, our cupboards, our menus, the rhythm of our days. No one will ever pry them out of our salty, sticky hands.
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