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Trail mix is a classic snack food; here it is made with peanuts, raisins, and M&M's

A picture of some low-calorie fruit and vegetable snacks, including apples, asparagus, beetroots, bell peppers, endives, and tomatoes.

A snack is a small service of food, and generally eaten between meals.^[1] Snacks come in a variety of forms including packaged snack foods and other processed foods, as well as items made from fresh ingredients at home.

Traditionally, snacks are prepared from ingredients commonly available in the home without a great deal of preparation. Often cold cuts, fruits, leftovers, nuts, biscuits, sandwiches, chocolate, popcorn and sweets are used as snacks. The Dagwood sandwich was originally the humorous result of a cartoon character's desire for large snacks. With the spread of convenience stores, packaged snack foods became a significant business. Snack foods are typically designed to be portable, quick, and satisfying. Processed snack foods, as one form of convenience food, are designed to be less perishable, more durable, and more portable than prepared foods. They often contain substantial amounts of sweeteners, preservatives, and appealing ingredients such as chocolate, peanuts, and specially-designed flavors (such as flavored potato chips).

Beverages, such as coffee, tea, are not generally considered snacks though they may be consumed along with or in lieu of snack foods.^[2]

A snack eaten shortly before going to bed or during the night may be called a (mid)night snack.

Snacks in the United States

In the United States, a popular snack food is the peanut. Peanuts first arrived from South America via slave ships, and became incorporated into African-inspired cooking on southern plantations. After the Civil War, the taste for peanuts spread north, where they were incorporated into the culture of baseball games and vaudeville theaters.^[3]

Along with popcorn (also of South American origin), snacks bore the stigma of being sold by unhygienic street vendors. The middle-class etiquette of the Victorian era (1837–1901) categorized any food that did not require proper usage of utensils as lower-class.^[3]

Pretzels were introduced to North America by the Dutch via New Amsterdam in the 17th century. In the 1860s, the snack was still associated with immigrants, unhygienic street vendors, and saloons. Due to loss of business during the Prohibition era (1920-1933), pretzels underwent rebranding to make them more appealing to the public. Packaging revolutionized snack foods, allowing sellers to reduce contamination risk, while making it easy to advertise brands with a logo. Pretzels boomed in popularity, bringing many other types of snack foods with it. By the 1950s, snacking had become an all-American pastime, becoming an internationally recognized emblem of middle American life.^[3]

Snacks and health

Healthy snacks include those that have significant vitamins, are low in saturated fat and added sugars, and have a low sodium content. ^[4] Examples of healthy snacks include:

• Foods that have whole grains^[4]
  


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  Fruits and vegetables^[4]
  


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  Nuts and seeds^[4]
  


• Low-fat dairy products^[4]
  


• Lean meats,^[5]eggs, such as hard-boiled eggs,^[5] and lean cheese
  

Nutritional concerns

Government bodies such as Health Canada recommend that people make a conscious effort to eat more healthy, natural snacks - such as fruit, vegetables, nuts, and cereal grains – while avoiding high-calorie, low-nutrient junk food.^[6]

A 2010 study showed that children in the United States snacked on average six times per day, approximately twice as often as American children in the 1970s.^[7] This represents consumption of roughly 570 calories more per day than U.S. children consumed in the 1970s.^[8]

Snacks and cognition

A Tufts University Department of Psychology empirical study titled "Effect of an afternoon confectionery snack on cognitive processes critical to learning" found that a consumption of a confectionery snack in the afternoon improved spatial memory in the study's sample group, but in the area of attention performance it had a mixed effect.^[9]

Types of snack foods

Image gallery

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  A rack of snack foods
  

  
  

  
  


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  Popcorn
  

  
  

  
  


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  Trail mix
  

  
  

  
  


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  Cheese-flavored crackers of the Cheez-It brand
  

  
  

  
  


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  Candy
  

  
  

  
  


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  A candy bar of the Snickers brand
  

  
  

  
  


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  Chocolate chip cookie
  

  
  

  
  


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  Fruit
  

  
  

  
  


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  Potato chips
  

  
  

  
  


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  Pretzels
  

  
  

  
  


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  Doughnuts
  

  
  

  
  


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  A blueberry muffin
  

  
  

  
  


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  Ants on a log
  

  
  

  
  


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  Dutch bitterballen
  

  
  

  
  


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  Peanuts
  

  
  

  
  

See also

References

Further reading

• (April 3, 1973.) "America: just one long snack bar." Ellensburg Daily Record. Accessed October 2011.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Snack food.

Wikibooks Cookbook has a recipe/module on Midnight Snack

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  Wikibooks Cookbook – A collection of recipes from around the world