Review: "Snack" by Eurie Dahn

Snack by Eurie Dahn
Published February 2026 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

—and there may indeed be people who snack on fruits and vegetables and, certainly, these foods qualify as snacks. However, this book will not take any part in this business. (loc. 709*)

Snacks are secondary...except maybe in their status as a cash cow, and except maybe in enjoyment of food. In Snack, Dahn examines the experience of snacking and some of the cultural considerations that make it what it is.

This isn't really a microhistory; snacking is so broad a topic that you'd need a much longer book (series!) to cover it all, and Dahn doesn't try. She defines snacks by six categories: absence of fire, lack of utensils, duration, portability, volume, and vibe. There are qualifications to most of these (for example, I won't be eating a tub of yoghurt with my fingers anytime soon), but on the whole it's a reasonable definition—though, as someone who is on the whole not too interested in cooking and perfectly happy eating some crackers and veggies and hummus for dinner (my partner despairs), I suspect that I have more overlap between meals and snacks than many.

I'm on record, repeatedly, as loving this series; that holds. How can you not love a reference to The Flamin' Hot Cheetos to academia pipeline (loc. 469)? And more than that, I appreciate that Dahn looks at the sociocultural implications of snacking—both the "back to childhood" sense that a particular snack can bring and the ways in which snacks, and (for example) playground reactions to snacks, can differ so widely.

I do not know if you know much about US public school culture in the 80s and 90s but dried squid and fish jerky were not necessarily hot commodities on the playground. (loc. 982)

Now I'm thinking that I'd like to see an anthology about snacks—essays from authors from different parts of the world, or different parts of a country, or who grew up in different eras, talking about the snacks they grew up with and how their relationship to snacking has changed...is that an odd thing to wish for? Probably. Now you'll have to excuse me while I go make myself a snack...

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.