SNAX Everywhere

Scratch that, one hundred percent of people eat. If that’s so, why is it that the one-percenters (or even the five per centers) get all the bandwidth? The way we see it, food is about a lot more than what chefs tell us it is, or what people who follow chefs want to know. The way we see it, those people really are the one-percent. Snax is for the rest of us. The 99 percent who eat.
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Exhibit A: Ka

tie’s favorite food is and always will be spaghetti. She has a lifetime to perfect her spaghetti sauce and elevate her game. She’s about 26,265 meals in at this point, with seven dinners per week to do something more than “get it right”. But sometimes, she doesn’t care about making it better. She wants it to be perfectly adequate, and nothing more. She wants food to be a character, not the centerpiece. Because the further we get down the rabbit hole of perfection, the further we get away from what originally drew her to her love of food in the first place: the details, the people, and her own world that a plate of spaghetti creates every single time she sits down to eat it. Exhibit B: Bill’s greatest work regarding food was snatched away from him when he was nine years old. His teacher helped his class to start a newspaper: blueish, mimeographed sheets churned out and stapled together by one of the nuns ensconced in the mailroom at his grade school. His assignment? To write about what he and his classmates were eating for lunch. It was a beat he could get down with. Lunch & recess were his favorite subjects! He had it all planned out: First, he was going to talk to the kids who had some unique Tupperware-encased meals. One kid's mother put Nestle Quick powder in a little TW saltshaker sealed with a square of waxed paper. He would unscrew the top, and make his own chocolate milk! A really big deal, because at Saint Francis De Sales Grade School, chocolate milk was served once a year: on Hot Dog Day, when the kids would get hotdogs wrapped in Schmidt Beer napkins. The brewery was a block away from the school, and the playground games of kickball were redolent with the fumes of malt churning out of the pipes in back of the brewery. He also wanted to talk about kids who ate (drank?) Spaghetti-O's from a Thermos container. For this topic, he drew a Thermos and made it look like a rocket ship, flying into space, with the caption, "COMING UP-THERMOS LUNCHES!"

Tragically, all of his dreams of being the class food columnist were crushed when his teacher re-assigned him to the beat about classroom chores. She did so because Bill was having too much fun. And for some reason, writing about cleaning the chalkboard, the erasers, and watering the plants lacked the shine of food. Snax is Bill’s big chance to revisit that shiny world of the food journalist. And unlike that teacher, Snax is very interested in Bill's brand of journalism. Exhibit C: Mecca has spent the past fifteen years as a food writer and culinary professional. She has come to the difficult decision that what’s new and what’s trendy, and even what’s good or what’s bad, is besides the point. Difficult, because that perspective won’t be popular with the new, the trendy, or the good (but it might be good news for the bad). At long last, she just wants to know what’s interesting. As she stated in a recent article defending her decision to no longer work as a critic: "I want to go beyond the salt on the meat. I want to know who killed the cow and why we like tenderloin more than liver. I want to write about the room where the meat was served, and about the whole wide world of food that produces the meat. (Although I might occasionally comment on there being too much, too little, or sometimes the perfect amount of salt.)" And like Katie, her favorite food is, and always will be spaghetti. Tenderloin be damned anyway. So. . .
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From the guilty pleasures of late night buttered noodles to hoarding ramen noodle packets in the back of the pantry so nobody else will get them, food is the introvert’s ticket to a lifetime of interacting with people. But what happens when your personal moment of shoving buttered noodles in your face becomes fair game for critique as the centerpiece of American culture’s dinner table? When all of a sudden your choices on what to put in your mouth affect your reputation, Instagram account, and social circle? We start to shy away from the intimacies of food and instead opt for the spectacle of it. The conversation reaches for the low-hanging fruit of what is already on the public dinner table, rather than digging deeply into our own relationships with eating and each other. Our favorite foods are ritual based, not trend-worthy. Our favorite food experiences are accidents, not bandwagons. And that is what SNAX is about. Remembering our personal relationships with food instead in of cowing to food culture's insinuations that they are subpar, uncultured, lacking sophistication, or missing key vocabulary terms. To hell food media’s rules. Your food is OK: even if we don’t happen to want any. And so is ours. Let’s talk about it. Let’s SNAX.
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