We suck at salty snacks
(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)
Okay y’all, we gotta talk about your salty snacks. Because by and large, you suck at them.
We need to talk about popcorn. (The buttery movie stuff; I will listen on Smartfood.) Any food item that needs a specific event to encourage you to eat it is by default a subpar food. Like, candy bars don’t need “eat us at the movies!” to be delicious; they’re delicious at movies and delicious at not-movies. But you never just go out and buy a box of buttery popcorn at the gas station for a road trip. You don’t just decide you’re hungry in the middle of a quarantined afternoon and go pop popcorn.
Popcorn is there for movies, maybe a ballgame or a carnival. And why is that? Because popcorn evokes memories. Memories are great! Nostalgia has its place! But let’s not pretend that that means the food itself is good.
At its best, popcorn is a conveyor of butter and salt, and half of it ends up in your teeth. Like, that’s the best-case scenario, that your snack food stays with you until you can get to floss or a toothbrush. What a great food to have when you’re sitting down in a dark room for the next two hours, miles away from your bathroom.
And again, that’s best-case! What if the popcorn was poorly popped? What if it isn’t fresh? What if there isn’t extra butter to find? Then you have dry, stale kernels in like half the bag.
You might say you like popcorn. But really, you like movies and you’ve been taken in by marketing. The next time you go to a movie (if we can ever do that again), just get Reese’s Pieces. Or just a drink. Or (gasp!) see a movie without snacks. (Okay, no, don’t do that, snacks are wonderful. Just sneak ‘em in.)
And, lest you think I’m done offending the world with food takes today, we also need to talk about potato chips. Potato chips as an entity are only okay. When you want chips, you want chips, but personally, I’m tired of them by, like, Chip 12. That does not mean I stop eating them at Chip 12, because they are addictive and right there, but I tire of chips far faster than I tire of other snack food, which means I only enjoy like half of my snack experience.
But this isn’t about potato chips in general. I don’t have an issue with them. What I do have an issue with, specifically, is the unholy abomination that is kettle-cooked potato chips. Kettle-cooked chips are the mean food you serve to someone you don’t like. Kettle-cooked chips are the knockoff, generic version of the soda you really want to get. If regular potato chips are Oreos, kettle-cooked chips are hydrox.
The beauty of potato chips is that they are crispy, but they also give. You don’t have to work on them. They just taste good and are uncomplicated. Kettle chips? “Hey, let’s take this tasty snack and make it 50% harder.” Biting into kettle chips is like when you take a bite of chicken and get bone, or if you think your PBJ is made with creamy peanut butter but it’s actually crunchy. I have no interest in you making what is already only an okay snack and making them tougher.
(No, they aren’t hard to eat, hush up. It’s just a more unpleasant form of the food.)
I love salt, because I love food. But as a people, we are so misguided about our salty snacks that I feel the need to correct you. Stop with the popcorn. Stop with the kettle chips. Stop straying from the light.