Two ways to consume food, or anything else

Two Patterns

Snacks are a small treat to fulfil a temporary need. I might eat an apple or a bag of nuts absently just to stave off hunger for a few hours. It’s instant gratification. Short term. It could be a habit or because I’m bored, and I certainly don’t plan it out in advance. I don’t remember snacks that I’ve eaten very well, and they tend to be simple foods – often only a single ingredient. Since they are born of convenience, snacks are often eaten alone.

Meals are larger than snacks. They take longer. Therefore, they can afford to be more complicated, and they’re certainly more likely to be planned in advance. They’re often scheduled rather than eaten as a habit. I can still remember a double digit number of individual meals that I’ve eaten in my life, some from many years ago, whereas I can’t remember a single specific snack besides those I ate in the past week. It’s not unheard of to emphasize quality in your meals, whereas shelling out dozens of dollars on a snack will get you weird looks. Meals are traditionally eaten in together with family or community.

Beyond Food

Meals-vs-snacks is a pattern that I notice in a lot of different domains. Here are some of them:

Exercise

One way of approaching exercise is to spend your whole life mostly immobile besides the intentional budget of hours that you spend daily or weekly on structured gym visits, long runs, or other short-but-intense exercise binges. Meals. Another is to partake in less-intense but more frequent exercise: a job which necessitates frequent small movements, a walking commute, a low-intensity weekly dance class. Snacks.

Entertainment

If you want to be entertained quickly, there are thousands of snacks – listicles, bite-size youtube videos, 20-minute episodic comedies, and simple phone games that can get you that dopamine hit quickly and with no commitments or frills. If you want to more intentional entertainment, perhaps with a specific block of your schedule set aside for it, there are books, movies, longer-episode television, and long form video games that you can enjoy as meals, instead.

Social

When I was in school, I was constantly surrounded by people who I was familiar with but didn’t necessarily like or know well, and we’d have random friendly interactions on a daily basis. These snacklike social interactions are a mainstay of communal living. On the other hand, most of my social interaction nowadays comes from pre-scheduled weekend excursions and events with a curated group of high quality friends, and it’s not uncommon to go a whole week without interacting with anyone besides these friends and my coworkers.

Improving your life with this

I’ve been using this concept a lot recently to improve my relationship with the various good things in my life. For example, recently I’ve been on a diet that drastically restricts my calorie intake. When I started this diet, I was eating snacks whenever I was hungry during the day. An apple here, a bag of nuts there, and soon enough I found that I was out of calories when it was time for dinner! I would go to bed feeling annoyed and unsatisfied even though I had technically had ‘enough to eat’. Later in the diet, I experimented with reserving a certain amount of calories for a large, complicated evening meal which I cooked. I found myself more satisfied when it was time for bed, and I enjoyed the food more once I’d had a few hours without snacks to work up an apetite, too.

A similar thing happened with the entertainment that I was taking in. I had a list of books that I “should” read, gathering dust in my phone, while I whiled away my three free nightly hours watching youtube videos or shitposting on discord – quick, snacklike, dopamine hits. When I did go for the books, I’d find them dull and often have the impulse to check my phone or switch the background music, since I was so accustomed to the instant satisfaction of snacklike entertainment. When I intentionally weaned myself off of discord, youtube, google, and similar services, I found that I had a much larger attention span to use on books, thoughts, and writing this motherfucking blog, which, although somewhat less habit-forming, are much more memory-forming. That’s the problem with instant gratification: it only lasts an instant.

Of course, mealization is only useful for some domains. In others, we could stand to be more snackish. I can’t help but think that the atomization and loneliness that seems a mandatory part of adult life in this day and age could be drastically reduced by emphasizing our looser, more occasional ties to the people around us. The social connections that arose in villages and neighborhoods as a result of nothing more than proximity, consistency, and tolerance have been devalued, and although we are still in some ways socially fulfilled, at least in my experience that fulfillment comes from longer term (and often longer distance) friendships that we are forced to allocate explicit time to, if we want to keep them. Annoying.

Furthermore, when a tourist experiences a new place, they often emphasize the meals – specific, pre-packaged, memorable experiences that they can plan out, take part in, and then carefully chronicle on social media. Arguably, though, the culture of a place is more alive in the small details – the weekly trips to the grocer, the afternoon walks in the plaza, the spontaneous trip to a random restaurant you’ve never heard of before you saw the sign – than in the overblown and legible tasks that a tourist favors. Therefore, when traveling, it might behoove you to be more snackish.