Snack food transience

Don’t get too attached to your favorite snack

I am a serial snack junkie and obsessor. My MO on this is to find, usually by accident, some kind of snack food, then obsess about it and continually buy it until either:

• It becomes terrible (quality degrades)
• It disappears from stores entirely

One of these two will always happen. There have been no exceptions.

I think part of the problem is that I tend to choose snack foods that are a little outside the mainstream, taste-wise. For example, back in the mists of time there was, at our local health food store, a certain tamari-flavored potato chip. Oh my God! This was my first snack-based crush! I’d go up there and grab a bag or two. I did this for some time and then one day I went and they were gone…no explanation, just poof.

That was the disappearing example, but what about the becomes-terrible kind? Example: I used to be in love with Red Hot Blues. This was is blue corn chip that was amazing: super crunch, smothered in hot spices. The spice coating was incredible: There was a ton of it and it was so, so good. There was so much spice, that at the bottom of the bag there was always an awesome pile of spice that would collect, because there was too much to stay on the chips! I would take the last chips in the bag and use them as a spoon to get every last bit of spice. There was even a cheat because some bags, I assume just because of mechanical variance, had less spice in general throughout the bag. But magically, the bags actually had a transparent window that allowed you to see which bags had the most spice!

So what happened? Enshittification.

Apologies to Cory Doctorow for borrowing a word meant for for another industry, but I think it also fits nicely here and probably a lot of other places. Slow degradation of good things. In this case, some bean-counter decided that these chips cost too much to make and started slowly cutting down on the quality. There was less and less spice and then, adding insult to injury, the bag was redesigned so that it was no longer possible to see which bags had the most spice. This leads falling sales, which leads to more cost-cutting. What a tragedy. A great snack food ruined. It probably would have been better if they had disappeared entirely.

Since the Red Hot Blues debacle, I’ve become more wary of losing my heart to one snack. They always get worse or go away. Maybe the economics of the snack food industry don’t support making great snacks, so only the mediocre survive?

Everything is temporary