New Books in Economic and Business History Eurie Dahn, "Snack" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Mar 16, 2026
Eurie Dahn, scholar of Black American periodicals and literature and author of Snack (Bloomsbury, 2026). She traces how snacks became mainstream through packaging, corporate tactics, and marketing. Short takes explore Flamin' Hot Cheetos, kid-focused products, immigrant snack cultures, and how snacks carry meanings of pleasure, memory, race, and diet culture.
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Snack Means Small And Trivial
- The word snack historically signals triviality, originating from a 1400s sense of a small bite or snap.
- That linguistic smallness helps explain cultural dismissal of snacks even as they gain outsized cultural and commercial importance.
Packaging Made Snacking Explode
- Packaging transformed snacks from public/vendor foods into respectable domestic products and enabled mass home consumption.
- Dahn links packaging innovations to the 1980s–1990s explosion in snacking that matches her childhood memories.
Six Practical Traits That Define Snacks
- Dahn defines snacks by six traits: absence of immediate cooking, no utensils, short duration, portability, less satiating, and a playful vibe.
- These criteria explain why cookies, chips, and extruded products occupy snack aisles despite exceptions.
