Down With Snack Culture
Just stop eating all the time.
Most Americans may not know this, but most of the rest of the world doesn’t eat like we do—which is to say, constantly. Americans eat all the time. Everywhere we go and everything we do seems to involve little bits of food in some way. Every work meeting, every work breakroom, every church function, every conference, every convention, every library board meeting, every city council meeting, every book club, everything—all of it comes with a cascade of snacking foods, little bits and chunks and crumbs of food meant to help you subsist in the scant few hours between breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner. Bags of chips, weird little soft jelly-filled granola bars, bags of nuts, bananas, waxy apples, trays of synthetic baked goods, trays of completely lame deli-meat sandwiches, cookies, cheese platters, fake pastries, fake breads with rock-hard butter pouches and fake jellies. Nowadays you’re apt to see marginally “healthier” options like 0.5 oz bags of popcorn popped in unsaturated fat, say, or vegetable straws, or zero-calorie cookies pumped full of formaldehyde in order to stop it from rotting long enough to get into your mouth. Just endless food, food, food, all the time, ever-present and unabating.
Most of the world doesn’t do this; most of the world has figured out how to have three civilized meals a day and be completely satisfied by that. You won’t catch me saying this often, but, in this case: Be like most of the rest of the world. Stop eating all the time. Stop snacking constantly. Do your part to end this paradigm. You’ll be happier and you’ll be a part of a great war effort, a vital link in something larger and more important than any of us.
You might argue that it’s no big deal. You would be wrong. Eating like this is profoundly unhealthy. The United States is profoundly unhealthy. Roughly 40% of American adults are obese; within just a few short years it will probably be half of us. Obesity makes you sicker in just about every way a person can be sick. All of that weight is coming from the relentless, nonstop snacking; Americans are eating on average roughly 1,000 calories per day more than they were at midcentury. I’m not one of those people who thinks obesity is a matter of “collective health” or whatever, you can be whatever weight you want, but we should at least admit that being extremely fat is in the main suboptimal and should be reflexively discouraged, at least if we care about other people.
But we’re not even really doing that: Our kids, even, are getting fatter and fatter, and yet this week the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that obese children as young as 13 be given surgery and pharmaceuticals to manage their weight. The simple and healthy approach would be for your kids to stop snacking all the time, to simply stop eating constantly throughout the day, relentlessly. And yet our weird dedication to this strange way of life preempts even that simple solution: The proposal from our child health experts is to put them on drugs and under the knife! Amazing.
Beyond that, it’s simply uncivilized. That might sound silly to say, but the truth of the matter is that eating constantly—being unable to control your own appetite to the point that you can’t make it between reasonably spaced meals without eating—is kind of animal-like. A wild animal has a primal incentive to eat whatever it can find, because in the brush there’s never any guarantee that the next meal is coming. We don’t have that imperative; we’re humans, we’ve invented and sustained a complex chain of supply that broadly ensures a constant access to healthy food. It’s not going anywhere. Yet a nonstop stream of snacks implies that we simply have to get it where we can or we might die; it’s an irrational ablation of the thinking part of your brain in favor of something much more animal-like. That is, I think we can all agree, not good.
Do your part: End snack culture. Let it die. Don’t eat the stuff they set out in the breakroom or at the church finance council meeting; I don’t care if it’s some garbage Costco tray or if it’s something really nice and homemade, don’t eat it. (Take some home if only to avoid hurt feelings: “We will enjoy this so much after dinner.”) Stop eating stuff in your car, you don’t need to do it, you can make it. Don’t eat at your desk; you won’t die if you don’t, I promise. If you’re a parent, stop feeling the need to leave the house with a cornucopia of chips, cheesy puffs, carrot sticks and other plastic-baggie’d stuff. You and your child can deal with a trip to the grocery store or the hardware store without your child having a handful of potato chips the whole time. Your child is like you: He simply does not need to eat all the time, he can absolutely make it from meal to meal without having to consume something in between. We’ve all tried it the other way, we’ve tried the snacking thing, and it’s making us sicker and more miserable with each passing year. The proof is in the pudding. And no, I’m not going to make a pudding joke. In summary: Snacking culture needs to end, it’s not a good thing and we’ll be happier and healthier without it. Try it and see!