The New York Times recently published an article about 2024’s food trends. One prediction jumped out at me: that meals will become passe while fancy snacks will become all the rage.
People may cease their three-square-meals habit and opt instead to munch on tasty tidbits all day long. To feed this trend, established brands will collaborate on nibbles, such as French’s limited-edition mustard-flavored Skittles or the Taco Bell and Milk Bar strawberry cake truffles with sweet corn fudge centers and an outer dusting of taco shells. Those are real things. How do I know? They’re just too weird to be made-up. (And also the New York Times provided links to prove it.)
While I read the article about snacks, I ate a snack — a small mochi, a pleasantly squishable blob of soft, chewy rice dough wrapped around a center of lightly sweetened paste, such as red bean, sesame or peanut. My daughter and I both love mochi, especially the ice cream variety, and I’m very glad indeed that this popular Japanese snack has landed on American shores. Maybe I’ll try to make mochi later this year, but definitely not in January, when simplicity is the order of the day. It feels like I’ve spent the past two months in the kitchen cooking holiday feasts. I’m all cooked out. I’d like to take a break from big meals for a while, both making them and eating them.
However, the delicious mochi got me thinking. I could definitely get on board with all-day snacking instead of meals. I’ve heard it said that grazing can be easier on the metabolism than three large meals, although whatever benefits this approach might confer are eradicated by eating too many cookies or chips (two of America’s most popular snacks). At any rate, snacking certainly increased during the pandemic, which strained our sense of normalcy and made mealtimes more flexible. On the plus side, maybe a more varied snack repertoire is one of the things that will carry over from those chaotic years.