Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Snacks are the new meals? Not exactly...(but maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing)
Could snacking do the cultural work of meals in the future?
That was one question that the “Power of Snacking” report raised for food studies professor Charlotte Biltekoff in our panel discussion last week in San Francisco. The answer, in the report and in a discussion between Charlotte, a forecaster (me), and two nutritionists (Tara Dellolacono Thies of Luna and Sarah-Jane Bedwell) was…”definitely maybe.”
Folks in the futures world are generally quite comfortable with answers like that. But in a room full of women—food bloggers, dietitians, nutritionists, curious passers by and a few significant others—this question, and the forecast it sprang from, raised some thoughtful questions and spirited disagreements.
I took away three issues from our discussion: one semantic and two deeply cultural. Semantically, what is the difference between well-paced snacking and the by now quite established nutritional advice of eating smaller, more frequent meals? Does the rise of snacking hang on ignorance of relevant meal types, or the decay of traditions around meals? And finally, to Charlotte’s point, are snacks increasingly holding more real meaning—meaning that they’ve been categorically denied in the recent past?
To the first point, the overall forecast of this report is a future in which the act of snacking has been rescued from the negative connotations it holds today, (like guilty, mindless, undisciplined eating), and it is normalized and even celebrated. Like any forecast, that is not a foregone conclusion, and if you disagree with it, good. Make a different future. Our moderator, Diane Dwyer, reflected that the idea of eating frequent meals was itself stressful to her, and the idea of more robust and nutritious snacking could be functionally identical, but emotionally easier to swallow. I think that women will find their own path through this potential semantic trap.
Another audience member, a shrewd dietician, argued that ignorance was partly to blame for this future. “Breakfast is literally ‘break fast’—whatever you eat first is your breakfast—when people say they don’t eat it, it’s just not true most of the time.”
Well, okay…but take this woman we interviewed in New York.
“From 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. I’m in school. After that, I’m commuting back home. I usually get home around 10:30 p.m. I’ll eat. In between I’ll snack or have lunch. I watch TV. I’ll take a nap for a couple of hours. It’s not even a full sleep, that’s why I call it a nap for three hours. Wake up, do a little bit of my paper, eat, snack or whatever, go back to sleep for a little bit and then wake up and keep on working. “
Source: 27-year old college student, NY
She sleeps in such short spurts she calls them “naps”—is she eating breakfast every time she wakes up…two or three times a day? The point of the forecast is that many meals like this are based around a standardized day, which just isn't true to many people's experiences. And the forces that created those conditions don’t show much sign of changing in the coming decade. What’s more, as Charlotte adroitly pointed out, people have been bemoaning the loss of the “traditional meal” for at least a century.
Another woman we interviewed in New York made a really fascinating distinction that I think is relevant here. She told us about her meals, and her snacks. But there was this other category of eating—“just food.” As she described what “just food” involved, I noticed that yes, it tended to lack one or more essential symbolic elements of a “meal.” More than that, to her, it lacked the intent to care for others that she identified as the hallmark of the family meals she ate with her parents on Sunday. But it also wasn’t a snack. Snacks she ate at work with colleagues, or in preparation for going to the gym. Snacks had more meaning than “just food.”
Another woman sharpened this kind of meaning into a specific ritual she and her family invented. This woman’s kids were all busy in the afternoons—soccer practice, softball, music, dance, etc. But at the pauses between events, in those moments when everyone was in the car, she kept a crate of different snacks. Each child, and the mother herself, gets to pick one, and they sit in the car and enjoy them together. Slipping on my anthropologist’s hat for a second, I’d argue that in this moment the minivan becomes a sacred space of not-busyness, and the selection and eating of snacks, a new kind of everyday ritual. It’s in these new rituals that we can glimpse the future of snacking redeemed, when snacks do in fact do some of the cultural work of meals.
In the report, the forecast, “Adopting more lifestyle appropriate eating patterns,” covers a lot of ground. It stretches from the basic sociological figures of work and time-use, to the push and pull between this bottom-up invention of new rituals, and the undeniable attempts of food makers and restaurants to create “eating occasions” where they may not be appropriate to people’s lives and health. But in each forecast we crafted a vignette to bring the forecast to life, and I’ll leave you with that.
Kayla munches absentmindedly on an apple. At 22, she has a full plate between classes, studying, interning at the student health center, and trying to make time to maintain relationships with her friends and her 54-year-old mother. So, the truth is, she eats when she can. Her roommate is out at class or partying most of the time, so the only real home-cooked meal she eats is Sunday dinner at her mom’s place a few hours away. It might be the only real meal her mom eats, too; after Kayla moved out she’s hasn’t seen the point of cooking for one.
When she wakes up at 4:00 a.m. to study and has a snack, is that breakfast? Or is breakfast what she eats after her 8:00 a.m. class gets out? Kayla’s all but given up keeping track, settling instead for making sure to snack before she gets too hungry, trying to eat healthy snacks primarily to keep her weight down, and attempting to get a few fruits and vegetables in her body each day. All-veggie smoothies are her favorite snack to combat her afternoon drowsiness through chemistry lectures, but they aren’t the cheapest option, so she only indulges in one a couple of times during the week. Every once in a while, she’ll try to plan ahead to make sure she has healthy snacks to eat stashed for the week. Inevitably, however, she’ll get caught up in school projects and end up selecting from the vending machine outside the library. Kayla’s kept on her freshman 15 and then some, and she often wishes she could see a point in the future where she would have more time to focus on losing the weight by eating better and working out more.
But, for now, spending time to make home-cooked meals or go to the gym more than once or twice a week seems out of the question, as does giving up going out with her friends for late-night tacos, the one social thing she does. She’s hopeful that between earning her undergraduate degree and starting medical school, she may be able to take better care of herself, but she knows that once she starts school again, her schedule will be just at hectic as it is now. Kayla thinks that once she is in her 30s she’ll eat proper meals each day, but right now, snacks are the more realistic choice.