Ode to Snacks

By Brooke Barker

Brooke Barker lives and works in Portland, Oregon. As a child she snacked on cold hot dogs, but now she prefers any snack but that.

If you haven’t had French Toast Crunch, it’s too late.

French Toast Crunch is gone. So are Crispy M&M’s and Lemon Ice Gatorade—they stopped making them. No one even knows why they did it. I’m not even sure who they is, but they get rid of snacks every day.

Today the number of people currently alive on earth is seven percent of the earth’s total since-the-begininning-of-earth population. Without doing any research at all I’m going to guess that the number of available snacks is only ten percent of the total available snacks that have ever existed. The other ninety percent you’ll never see again.

There are some snacks you can’t eat because they were limited edition. In 1995 you could buy Christmas Cap’n Crunch that came with a special packet of glitter frosting to spread on your cereal after you added milk. But they made it for only one year, because the world wasn’t ready. Even eighteen years later, most people I talk to don’t seem ready. We also weren’t ready for Rice Krispies with Pop Rocks, green ketchup, or BLT tacos at Taco Bell.

In a world where someone is still trying to sell ham-flavored Toaster Strudels and those gross little black licorice nibs, a world full of Werther’s Originals, why can’t we have Wild MagicBurst Pop-Tarts anymore, the kind that change color in the toaster? Even though all Pop-Tarts get slightly more toasty-colored in the toaster, so maybe that isn’t a huge loss. But why can’t we have Ecto-Cooler Hi-C?

My research seemed sort of incomplete so I called my sister to ask if she could think of more discontinued snacks. It only took a few seconds to realize she wasn’t recalling snacks from memory; she was reading them from a Wikipedia page. Either the alphabetic order or the very specific mention of Aruba Jam Sprite Remix gave it away. But I let her keep reading, because there’s something really nice about having someone read you a complete list of every snack that doesn’t exist anymore. MagiColor Crunch. 3D Doritos. “Something called Surge, looks like a soda.”

When someone is reading you a complete list of every snack that doesn’t exist anymore, you can put the phone on speaker and eat a snack right then. Foods aren’t here forever, and the best time to eat isn’t lunch or even breakfast—it’s anytime. There’s a really good chance it’s right now.