Snack

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial-perhaps even juvenile-especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savory snack foods in supermarkets reveal the popularity of snacking. The availability of snacks at other non-food-focused stores like home improvement and department stores suggest that, at any point, a person may need a snack. The ubiquity of snacks in our culture is a relatively new phenomenon, one that is not universal to all countries. Snack traces the story of how snacking culture came to be through investigations of specific snacks, including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, popcorn, and Pocky, and in the context of issues of ethnicity, class, gender, popular culture, and even parenting. Ultimately, Snack provides an idiosyncratic cultural history to offer new ways of looking at the grocery store snack aisles.