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- [00:01]
Dr. Yuri Dan
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Yuri Dan
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Yuri Dan
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- [01:35]
Dr. Yuri Dan
hello
- [01:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because I get to talk to Dr. Yuri Dan about her book titled Snack, published by Bloomsbury in 2026 as part of the Object Lesson series, which we are going to be talking about. Some specific snacks I'm not going to give away yet which ones, but also think about this as a category. It's a really important kind of food, but also often seen as a sort of trivial kind of food, maybe even childish, and yet it's all over supermarkets. So what's going on, in fact, with snacking today? How did we get to this point and kind of what does it mean to live in a world of snacks? So clearly a whole lot to talk about. Yuri, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:27]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Thank you Miranda. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
- [02:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am as well and I'm intrigued to start off, if we can, with you introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write an Object Lessons books and about snacks.
- [02:45]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Well, so if you look at the trajectory of my writing career, I think you would think snacks seems a little bit out of the blue. But just to let you know a little bit about myself, I'm a scholar of Black American periodicals and literature of the Jim Crow era. So I've published two other books. My first book is a monograph titled Jim Crow African American Periodical Cultures. And in that one I look at Black American periodicals and literature of the early 20th century, late 19th century, and think about the ways that they existed in a network and how they worked against racial violence. My second book is a co edited edition of Pauline Hopkins's work of Black speculative fiction of One Blood. It was a serialized novel published in the early 20th century. And it's amazing and a lot of things happen. There's Leopard, and so that's my academic work. So it seems like a book on snacks is a departure from my other work. And it is, but it still engages with issues related to race, ethnicity and class. So I do see it continuous with my other work. And in terms of the Obscure Lesson series, I've long been an admirer of that series. I mean, what is there not to love? You know, the topics are great, the covers are amazing, and each book, I mean, for listeners who are not familiar with this series, each book in the series examines, from a variety of perspectives, an object loosely defined. So, you know, there are books on golf balls, gin, dust stickers, office drone, more. I own some of them myself. And so I realized I could pitch. I could submit a pitch to write a book in this series. And I submitted one on Flaming Hot Cheetos. So those, you know, those spicy and bright red corn snacks. And the reason I submitted this pitch was because, well, first, A, it appealed to my sense of humor, and B, I really wanted to write about the place of those snacks in my childhood and in U.S. culture. And then, you know, just see, I thought it would be great to have a Flaming Hot Cheetos book on my cv. And another reason I was interested in writing for this series is that I was looking to sort of branch out my writing from purely academic writing to bridging the gap to more formal, like popular forms of writing. And the Object Lessons series is a perfect place for that because it kind of exists at that intersection. And so Christopher Schaeffer, one of the series editors, and his crew seemed interested in my Flaming Hot Cheetos idea. But, you know, they provided the feedback that the topic seemed overly specific, which I understood. And then I Although I probably could talk about Flaming Hot Cheetos for a very long time, but maybe not everyone wants that. And so, so I reworked my idea, and then I went back and forth with them a little bit. And then I, before I turned, hit upon the manuscript on snacks. And so what I learned in that process is that I had more to say about snacks beyond just the flaming Hot Cheetos. So while Flaming Hot Cheetos, that's the first chapter in my book, I do talk about a lot of other snacks that have a lot of meaning to me. Although I think it's important to say that I don't talk about every snack. That would be impossible. And I don't see my book as a comprehensive take on snacks or snacking culture.
- [06:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, it's clearly one perspective on snacks, which is, as you said, kind of what all the Object Lessons books tend to be. I've had the pleasure of interviewing many of the authors of Object Lessons books and Chris, in fact, himself as well. So always fun to see kind of what perspective is taken on the particular object. And as you mentioned, we are going to talk about Flaming Hot Cheetos. Don't worry, listeners, we will get there. But as you mentioned, Jerry, the book isn't just about that one particular snack. It's about kind of the category more broadly. So can we talk about where the word even comes from and what it used to mean?
- [07:01]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah. So, you know, my background is in literature, so of course I had to look at the Oxford English Dictionary and look into where the word comes from. And basically, in my research, I found, you know, that the word snack has always meant something small, like a morsel. And the earliest appearance of the word had the definition of, you know, a snap or a bite, like from a dog. This is from the 1400s. And so what I realized was that snacks always have held the idea of triviality within its very definition. Like, it's not. It's not a devouring like a dog, you know, leaping and mauling you. It's just a snap, a bite. It's a small thing. It's a morsel. And so snacks have always held the idea of triviality. And so I became sort of interested in why, you know, snacks are considered to be so trivial. Why are they so popular? And as you mentioned earlier, why are they such a big business? The language around snacks seems to be really about diminishing, about emphasizing its smallness, and yet they seem to hold an outsized place in people's imaginations in popular culture, in the grocery Store and in our mouths and stomachs.
- [08:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a pretty big transformation indeed from, as you said, sort of another word used to describe a pretty specific thing that dogs do. So how did we get to snacks being such a popular thing and sort of way of going about eating behavior? I mean, it's not the 1400s. When. When and how does that.
- [08:43]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Well, so, you know, Speaking from the U.S. context, you know, if you think about an average U.S. grocery store and likely, you know, grocery stores and other places, you can see how much real estate snacks take up, you know, depending upon how you define snacks. And, you know, at my local grocery store, for example, there's a whole aisle for chips, pretzels, and popcorn, but there's also a candy aisle, and then there's an aisle for crackers and cookies. And so I want to be careful to say that, you know, my book is mainly focused on US Snack culture, because that's what I'm familiar with. And I understand that snacks and snacking are cultural, culturally constructed. And, you know, there are major differences across, you know, countries, cultures, historical periods, et cetera. But in the US at least, you know, snacks take up a lot of real estate in grocery stores. Even if you go to the local hardware store, you're going to see snacks, snacks that you can buy as you're waiting in line. And so, you know, how did we get here? Basically? I mean, that was one of the motivating questions behind my book. And so previously, snacks were associated with public spaces. You know, if you think about peanut and popcorn vendors, you think about pretzels at bars or places where alcohol is served. But then what happened is in the 20th century, snacks started becoming a package. So the real innovation in making snacks popular was in packaging. So once you figured out how to package snacks, then you can take them into the private spaces, like the home. So this is not to say that of course, people weren't snacking otherwise, but this is about when snacking became, like, exploded in popularity. And so once you can package up pretzels, for example, someone doesn't need to go to a seemingly disreputable place like an establishment that serves alcohol. They can to eat pretzels. You can buy pretzels taken into your home and snack in a sort of more, I guess, respectable place, the domestic space. And so this basically, it's packaging that caused snacks become more popular and considered to be less disreputable. And then basically the popularity of snacking doubled between the 1980s and 1990s. And that matches up pretty well with my childhood. So I found that sort of serendipitous, or maybe it explained a lot of things to find in the research that it was during my childhood that snacking became more prevalent, that the kind and variety and quantity of snacks increased greatly.
- [11:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really interesting to kind of point us towards changes in packaging, which may not be where we sort of would have thought would make the change and timing as well there. But you do raise a good point in terms of the aisles of the grocery store, of one for, like, chips and pretzels, one for cookies. What exactly is a snack? How might we define it?
- [11:49]
Dr. Yuri Dan
This is a really hard question and one I struggled with at the beginning of writing this book. And then at the end, I took a look at my definition again to sort of figure out if I still believed in it. So in my book, I have a completely unauthoritative definition that I'm sure that I know. It has many exceptions. So, I mean, one could snack on anything, really. You could snack on the turkey leg if you wanted to, and I'm sure people do. And you could smack snack on mashed potatoes if you really wanted to. However, those are not items that we generally think of as snacks. And so I tried to make sense of it all by thinking about snacks from the perspective of different things like portability, duration, volume. I try to think about what distinguishes a snack from a meal. So in sort of the food category, snack is set up as distinct from a meal. Like a meal is more substantive. A snack is, as we've discussed, like, trivial, small, not as necessary as a meal. And so when I thought about a snack versus a meal, I hit upon six points. And so I'm just going to go over those six points right now. And I really want to mention again that, you know, not definitive. There are many exceptions. But this is what I think, you know, as someone who's written a book on snacks, distinguishes a snack from something like a meal. So one is, I would say, something like the absence of fire. And by that I don't mean like, you know, if you were cooking something ahead of time and then you snacked on it. I don't mean something like that. I mean, like, you don't have to cook it right away and then eat it right away. So, you know, like a cookie, you could bake it ahead of time and then it could sit there and then you could eat it and snack on it. So I think of a snack as something that requires very little in the way of immediate preparation. So cookie would qualify, number two. I think that utensils are not necessary necessary for snacks. Fingers are acceptable. And number three, I would say duration, snacks are consumable within a short period of time. So of course, one could spend a long time eating a bag of chips. But you also, each individual chip is just doesn't take a long time. And snacks generally are not things you draw out over hours or anything like that. That and four would say, I would say is portability, that snacks are something you take on the go or that you can take on the go. And five, I would say snacks are not filling in the same way as a meal. So what I mean by that is, of course one could eat like a whole bag of Doritos and be full, but it's not satiating in the way I'm meal would be. And I mean, certainly who hasn't among us eaten snacked in place of a meal? But I think that there's a distinction in the way that a snack doesn't satiate in the way like a full meal might. And then finally, when I was thinking about snacks, I thought about the fact that snacks have a certain vibe that meals don't have, that snacks invite a kind of playfulness, they're kind of fun. And part of this is deliberately so. But snacks generally have a kind of different textures, different ways of eating, and they're not. It's not governed by a lot of rules. So snacks really don't have a lot of rules associated with them, unlike with meals. So with meals you have a lot of rules, rules like, you know, which foods you eat at different times. So some people think that you shouldn't be eating sushi for breakfast. For me, that sounds kind of nice, honestly, but that's a kind of meal rule that we have. And also with meals, you're generally asked to use utensils for the most part. I mean, obviously there are exceptions, but with some snacks, you don't have that sort of mandate, I guess, or loose mandate that you might have for a meal. So I think that with snacks, you know, there are many different things to think about, but those sort of six qualities seem to me the ways to define a snack.
- [16:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's tons of exceptions to all of that, but it certainly gives us enough to be getting on with. Right. Enough ideas there to certainly investigate in more detail as we develop the conversations to kind of keep in mind as we talk. But before we do that, in some cases, I actually kind of want to go back for a moment to the sort of timing you gave us in terms of when snacks became so popular, because these ideas about kind of snacking at home and portability and convenience. Is it a coincidence that the rise of snacking, for instance, around your childhood, for instance, is that a coincidence that that's roughly around the same time that for example, in the US we see a decline in snacks smoking?
- [17:13]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah. So I mean, this is one of the big surprises in my research is that. So, you know, as I mentioned, snacks really became popular as a food category in the 80s and 90s. And there's some research, research by academic named Tara Fazino and other researchers that suggest that major tobacco companies bought up major food corporations in response to the increasing regulation of tobacco and the decrease in profits from tobacco. So along with snack, you know, the rise in snacks. I do remember my childhood being one where we had the transition where there was more language about how cigarette smoking is bad for you. And I remember that very vividly from my childhood because I remember growing up and cigarette smoking was the norm or was typical. And then it slowly there was a PR campaign to point out that it is not so good for you. And it turns out that according to this research, that this was a deliberate strategy where major tobacco companies bought these big food corporations because they kind of knew or that that the. The increase in regulation of tobacco would lead to the decrease in profit. So they applied that the tactics that they learned in the process of making their tobacco products more appealing and addictive to. And they used it on food. And so this is what Terra Fazino has found in their research. And so basically what happens at that period is that the explosion of slightly snacks is related to the fact that snacks are harder to stop eating. So they just. It's like there are various characteristics of snacks and there are food scientists who work to sort of figure out how do we make this food hard to stop eating, like the crunch, the flavors involved, et cetera. And so there's a real tie between the rise of snacking and the decline of smoking. Spring is here, and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's
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- [21:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is really fascinating. I was very surprised and intrigued to read about that in the book, so thank you for taking us down that route to it, but I think we've perhaps delayed the promise long enough. In our conversation. We did say we'd get to Flaming Hot Cheetos. So how do we get from the potato chip or where I live, the crisp, which has loads of different flavors to it but is relatively straightforward in terms of what it is to the very specific flaming Hot Cheeto.
- [21:45]
Dr. Yuri Dan
I love Miranda that you're keeping your promise and that we're going to be talking about Flaming Hot Cheetos. Yes. How can we know it exactly? That's, that's. Everyone wants to talk about flaming hot Cheetos. And your question is a really good one and I have to say, like, I don't have a great answer, although I have an answer. So, you know, as you said, potatoes seem relatively straightforward. Like potato chips seem relatively straightforward. You know, it's fried slices of potatoes and they don't seem related to something as ostentatious as the flaming hot Cheeto. You know, how do you get from a simple, humble potato chip to this like red, like crazy crazily flavored of hot Cheeto. And so, you know, the earliest known mention of the potato chip seems to be from 1817. And it's a cookbook published in London by a guy named William Kitchener, who I have to say seems really wonderful. He went around with basically a cabinet or suitcase of condiments. I am very into condiments, and I think that William Kitchener and I would be friends. And so his recipe in the cookbook is simple. It's basically peel the potatoes, slice them, thinly, dry them, flour them, fry them in lard, sort of very. I think they would be pretty recognizable to us as potato chips. Flame pale Cheetos, on the other hand, are not potato. They're not exactly chips. And they're basically in the family of products that. That the industry calls extruded corn products. You know, super romantic name, right? I would love to have some extruded corn products. So they're not the same. Although in the 21st century right now, you would find them next to the potato chips. They're a different beast. But you could also say that they're kind of related. Without potato chips, there would be no Flaming Hot Cheetos. And so Flamingo Cheetos I see as sort of part of the evolution of snacking, you know, kind of one upping of flavors and, you know, part of the move toward ethnicizing snacks, you know, to add new flavors and to also maximize profits. It's kind of like, you know, taking it up another level. And I think food corporations tend to do that a lot is they take a snack and then they add to it to make it more extreme to. Or to create some excitement around it, to revitalize the product line. And Flaming Hot Cheetos, despite seeming so different from potato chips, are basically in that family tree.
- [24:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm.
- [24:38]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah.
- [24:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Cause they do seem pretty different if you open them up side by side. What makes these Flaming Hot Cheetos then? So both, well, popular, obviously, but they're kind of controversial too, right?
- [24:50]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah, I mean, I think. I mean, one of the things. Some of the things I was very interested in when I was first thinking about this book is I was really interested in apostrophe. You know, it's not flaming, it's flaming. And along with that, I was also interested in the color and the kind of spice level. You know, you could imagine that someone could create something like flaming hot, a flamin hot Cheetos. That's more just, you know, without the apostrophe, without the in your face color, and with something that's a Little bit more toned down in terms of spice level. And so there. There are surprisingly a lot of stories about Flaming Hot Cheetos causing physical pain to people, like from overconsumptions or Flaming Hot Cheetos being shaped like something else, like a Pokemon that cause people to pay millions of dollars for one Cheeto at auction. And so there's a lot. I mean, Flaming Hot Cheetos have a lot of interesting PR associated with it. And so to me, the bright red color, the apostrophe, the spice level, you know, signify the desire, like, on the part of the corporation that makes sense Flaming Hot Cheetos to be perceived as somewhat counterculture or youthful. You know, it's all marketing, of course, but it's, you know, if you say you like Flaming Hot Cheetos, you are sort of saying, look, I am not boring. I have interesting taste. I like this thing that is considered to be weird. I don't need to use GS when I say Flamin, you know. And so I just think it also engenders a lot of passion on the part of people because it's kind of so absurd, you know. And you can use. You can see Flaming Hot Cheetos being used in a lot of cooking videos on TikTok or in other places. I've seen it at, like, say, Korean corn dog restaurants. You can have your Korean corn dog coated in Flaming Hot Cheetos at Poke bowl restaurants. Sometimes I have seen that one of the toppings is Flaming Hot Cheetos. And finally, I mean, I would argue that they taste good. Maybe not to everyone, but to a lot of people, they taste good. They have a deeply savory and spicy taste with a fun variety of textures that invite more eating. And of course, that gets us back to the idea of how to make snack foods more addictive, how to make them more appealing, how to make them harder to stop eating. And I think Flaming Hot Cheetos are kind of the epitome of that.
- [27:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, ostentatious, I think, is such a great description of them. So thank you for helping us analyze kind of one of or some of the reasons, at least they might be popular. If we're thinking, though, about snacks. And again, some of the techniques that might have been used to make smoking popular, obviously, the kind of ostentatious, the pr, the deep sort of savory flavor, those are definitely reasons is another one that kind of one is introduced to and begins to like snacks. Quite often as a kid, right? We have kids snacks, like, as a thing. When did that happen?
- [28:02]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah, I mean, I. I think, you know, there. There's some research that indicates that the rise of industrialized baby foods is part of the reason why there's a rise of interest in processed foods and other kinds of, you know, foods of that nature, and why more and more people are kind of more interested in eating those sort of highly processed foods. And so, you know, this book is really focused on childhood. It's focused on my childhood. It's focused on that of other children. And the reason is because snacks are so integral to parenting and children. It's a core part of many childhood memories. It's. I can probably name for you a lot of snacks that my mom packed for me when I was growing up, and which ones would have made my day and which ones I was less pleased with. And I think a lot of people could talk about that, too. And, of course, with parenting, people often talk about, you know, what kinds of snacks are best for children. And so I would say that the impetus to my writing this book was due to my desire to talk about the snacks that were important to me as a child. And so, you know, feeding a child has always been contested terrain. I mean, it's not a new phenomenon. In the late 19th century, there was an influential parenting book called the Care and Feeding of Children by a guy named. He was a pediatrician named L. Emmett Holt. And he basically advised parents that children should not be given snacks because he was saying that children should be encouraged to eat more nourishing meals. So you shouldn't give them snacks. You should kind of make them hungry for the meal, not the snack. Because, again, this goes back to the idea of snacks as trivial and meals as the main. The main deal. Right? And we've heard this advice even now. I mean, this is still advice that people hear from their pediatricians, from the media, et cetera. But once we got to the mid 20th century, we have Dr. Spock, Benjamin Spock's hugely influential book called the Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare. And in that he. He was famous, he famously had a more relaxed approach to parenting, where Spock sort of presented a view of the pediatrician not as a kind of authoritarian expert who hands down knowledge from up high, but he presents a view of the pediatrician as a partner with parents. And he. One of his biggest pieces of advice is to parents is to trust yourself. And he says that in his book. He says that many children need a snack between meals, but his snacks were not flaming hot Cheetos or Goldfish Crackers, of course. And so we have. With the rise of industrialized foods in the 20th century comes that rise, I mentioned, of industrialized baby and children's foods. And that led to the development of children's snacks that are not so much about nutrition, but more about fun. And so they often become more about keeping a child occupied rather than feeding them. So, you know, there's only a certain number of calories in the day that a child might take in. But to make a food fun would mean that the child might eat more. So that's why you have crackers. They're shaped like animals. That's why you have more interactive things where you kind of dip a cookie stick into a little cup of chocolate, or you take a little cheese spread and you spread it over your crackers. That was one of the snacks I ate as a child. And so making children's food fun also leads to parents buying more snacks. And of course feeds into the kinds of parental anxieties about how do we feed our children, how do we keep them well behaved? And snacks can are part of all that. Like, do we give. What snacks do I give my child to feed them properly? Oh, no, I have a six hour plane ride with my child. What snacks do I need to bring to keep them quiet so that other people on the airplane plane are not furious at me? And so snacks can mean many things in childhood, in parenting that are beyond just about nourishment.
- [32:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting indeed to think about kind of how fun is being leveraged in those sorts of ways. Let's talk, I suppose, about staying with the idea of snacks in childhood, also kind of different snacks and who has snacks that are considered different and kind of what that means to think about difference in the context of snacking. If, for instance, we think about childhood immigrant experiences and snacks.
- [33:18]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Yeah, you know, as I mentioned, like snacks, like many foods, are a key part of the memories of one's childhood. And this book is my first time writing in a more autobiographical vein. This book is a cultural history of snacks, but also has a lot of personal elements to it. And for me, it was appealing to think of my own childhood in relation to the larger experience of immigrants and children of immigrants. So I'm the child of two immigrants and a lot of my snacking was related to that experience. And for me, when I was growing up in the, you know, 1980s and 1990s in California, it was really hard to explain, explain to other people how good Korean food is. I know that's maybe a little bit strange now because Korean culture. Korean food is everywhere. And I see it in, you know, the local grocery stores. I see it at chain restaurants. I see all kinds of people talking about it. But when I was growing up, Korean food really felt like a kind of secret that not everyone knew about it. And so, you know, it almost felt like something I couldn't explain to other people. You know, how am I going to explain to people who are not Korean how wonderful fermented cabbage in the form of kimchi tastes? And the meals I ate at home didn't really bear a resemblance to the meals I ate in other spaces. Like at school, you know, we were eating pizza at school. At home, I was eating kimchi jigae with rice, you know, kimchi stew with rice. I also ate other sort of more traditional kind of Americanized foods, too, but at home. But the main things I ate were Korean foods when I was growing up. So, you know, there was a lot of. Like, there was this dual sense that, yes, I knew Korean food was amazing. I felt it, I knew it. But I also knew that it was hard to accept, explain, or hard for other people to understand when other people were eating, you know, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and they weren't going to understand fermented cabbage as delicious. But the thing that I realized was accessible to other people was snacks, right? So I knew that snacks were easier. I didn't, of course, preach about all the snacks that I ate growing up. Korean snacks I ate, you know, because some of the snacks I loved best were things like dried squid snacks. I knew that the other kids on the playground, aside from, say, maybe the other children of immigrant kids would. The other children of immigrants wouldn't have understood the dried squid snacks. But I knew that I could eat things with chocolate, for example. Example. So I think a lot of people are familiar with pocky, which is the Japanese cookie stick with that's dipped in chocolate or other flavors. Their Korean version is called pepero. And so I knew that I could casually eat my pepero or pocky and flaunt my cool snacks. That's something that's. That's like a language that all kids can speak that looks good. And so I felt like it kind of gave me this sort of way to be able to make a connection between the food I was eating at home and then the food that I was eating in public, the person I was in public. And, you know, even still to this day, the snack aisle of an Asian supermarket is still really fun for me. It feels as though it's, you know, full of possibilities and like, what new thing am I going to discover? What new textures? And so it just, it was a lot of fun for me as a child and it continues to be so even now.
- [37:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is delightful and I'm very sad to pop your balloon, but I do think we should probably spend at least a little bit of time talking about the fact that snacking is not always fun for everyone and that often snacking is associated with feelings of guilt, as you've demonstrated with your own experience. That's not inevitable. Right.
- [37:39]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Thank you. That's. That's a wonderful segue. And so, yeah, I mean, I think so to go back to the definitions that, my definitions of snack, you know, there's. There's the feeling that. Or maybe the original definition of sack, there's the feeling that a snack. Snack is not necessary. Right. Like I mentioned how triviality is integral to the. Defin the word snack. And so it's not a meal, it's not substantive. So almost, it's almost like to eat snacks, it seems to be about eating something that's not fully nourishing. That's only for one's pleasure rather than one's need. So that's of course, you know, often a suspect thing. You know, pleasure can. People are often suspicious about pleasure. Oh, you're just doing it for fun. That must not be a serious thing. And so snacks offer pleasure. And this is what the theorist Lauren Berwant calls the counter absorption in episodic refreshment in the face of daily demands. So on a daily basis, people may be going to work, going to school, and maybe it's a little bit boring, maybe it's a little bit stressful. And so oftentimes people then turn to what Berlad called episodic refreshment. You know, something to kind of offer you a little treat. And so for some people it might be looking at social media, but for other people it might be something like treating yourself to a muffin from the coffee shop during the workday day, not because you're hungry, but because you need a little pick me up something to, you know, snacking is so emotional. It's oftentimes not about being hungry. It's sometimes just about, I just want, I'm bored, I want something. And so that's why snacking is often connected to guilt, because it's not considered to be a necessary thing. And one of the chapters of my book talks a lot about snacks and diet culture, because diet culture has just created this whole other category of snacks that are, you Know, non fat snacks from when I was a child. And now I think there's a push towards high protein, low sugar snacks. And so the idea is snacking seems important to people, but it's often like considered to be like a sign of weakness. And so being someone who snacks is often connected to the feeling of guilt. However, I would not say that it's an inevitable association. I mean, if we choose to think about seeking pleasure as not something one should feel guilty about, then we will not see snacking as a guilty pleasure. But the question of whether we live in a world where we can make that choice is a totally different matter.
- [40:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, certainly a lot to think about there and of course with many things in our conversation. So is there anything else that you're hoping that readers think about after reading the book?
- [40:55]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Well, I guess I hope readers are left with kind of an understanding of Snax as culturally constructed, or rather your desire for certain kinds of snacks is culturally constructed, historically constructed, you know, and that snacks are really connected to feelings and memories. So we think about snacks as being connected to the stomach, but really they're connected to this, to your feelings and to what you're, what you, how, what kind of connections you have from your childhood to snacks. I mean, certainly people do eat snacks for nourishment too, but snacks as a category are really heavily invested in the weight of, or weight, I don't mean to make it sound like a burden, but in the matrix of feelings and memories that one has from the past. And so ultimately I would like readers to think about what it means to be eating and buying snacks, you know, what it means that something trivial is actually not so trivial after all. And you know, next time they're in the grocery store to kind of, you know, take a moment to think about how we got here, why are we there now, standing at in front of aisle full of, you know, 10 different kinds of popcorn, for example.
- [42:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, a very immediately applicable question, I think, for many listeners. So lots to take away from the book and the conversation. What, may I ask, are you working on now, given how we started this discussion with you, explaining how this book is perhaps more related to your previous, more academic work than one might think. What are you doing now that SNAC is out in the world?
- [42:45]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Well, that's a really good question right now, just immediately. Right now I'm working on finishing an essay on W.E.B. du Bois Crisis magazine in the early 20th century. So this is a black American magazine that focused on crusading against racial violence. And in relation to that I'm thinking about precarity in relation to institutions, and I think a lot of us are thinking about that too. But in terms of the less academic work, I'm also thinking about new directions for my writing. And so what I'd like to do next after this essay on Du Bois crisis is done is I'd like to think of work to expand into more public forms of writing and sort of continue the trajectory that I am on right now with snac, but maybe in different directions. But some of that remains to be seen right now.
- [43:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, it definitely sounds like two sort of different parallel trajectories perhaps to keep going with. But of course, while you are exploring all of that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about. Guess what? It's called Snack, and it was published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Yuri, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:58]
Dr. Yuri Dan
Miranda, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to chat with you and chat and about my book. Thank you so much.
- [44:18]
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