How a Snack Becomes Dinner

You tell yourself you are just having a small snack to take the edge off while deciding what to cook. The edge, however, has other plans. Somewhere between the first handful and the fourth “taste,” your snack becomes dinner and quietly assumes control of the moment. Dinner loses the election without realizing it was on the ballot.

The next warning sign is that you don’t use a plate. Food migrates to a cutting board, a paper towel, or directly into your hand because you are “not really eating.” You open a second package for variety, a phrase responsible for countless unintended meals. You begin standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, as though refrigeration itself counts as exercise.

Melissa Grant, 42, a city planner from Duluth, Minnesota, insists she never eats dinner after work. She merely enjoys “a few crackers.” Independent observers in her family, however, have documented brie, salami, olives, roasted almonds, grapes, two varieties of pickles, and what she refers to only as “the emergency chocolate,” which had apparently been reserved for precisely this sort of non-dinner.

Trevor Haines, 35, a middle school band director from Boise, Idaho, snacks on tortilla chips while deciding what to cook. Forty minutes later he concludes that preparing a meal would now be “redundant” and finishes the remaining salsa with a spoon because washing another dish seems irresponsible.

The usual dinner-replacing suspects rarely disappoint. Tortilla chips with salsa or guacamole, hummus with pita chips, cheese and crackers, popcorn with suspicious amounts of butter, trail mix, pretzels with peanut butter, leftover charcuterie, cereal eaten directly from the box, and frozen mozzarella sticks all possess remarkable leadership qualities. Given sufficient time, each is perfectly capable of governing the entire evening.

The official moment your snack becomes dinner is not when you feel full. It is when you glance at the clock, notice it is nearly eight, briefly consider cooking something sensible, then decide one more cracker would make far more sense than dirtying a frying pan. By then the transition is complete. Dinner has simply changed its name while you were looking for something to nibble.

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