What Snack Are You, Deep Down?
Somewhere in every pantry sits a snack that matches your exact personality, and it is time you two were formally introduced. Are you reliable and beloved at parties, or intense, a little bitter, and adored by a devoted few?
Answer these seven questions with your gut. Overthinking is allowed but will not help, because the pantry already knows. At the end you will get your official snack identity, plus a caption ready for the group chat.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
Only one kind of maize does this
Heat ordinary sweetcorn and it merely burns. Popping belongs to one variety group, which combines an unusually hard, effectively watertight hull with an interior packed with dense starch. Remove either quality and you get a scorched kernel.
Archaeologists on the north coast of Peru have recovered maize remains including popped material from sites several thousand years old, so the discovery is not remotely modern. Somebody worked out what a hot surface does to the right kernel a very long time ago.
Each kernel is a small pressure vessel
A kernel holds around thirteen or fourteen per cent water by weight. Heat it and that water turns to steam with nowhere to go, so instead of boiling away it becomes superheated and internal pressure climbs to something like nine times atmospheric. The starch inside, under that heat and pressure, softens into a hot pliable gel.
At roughly 180 degrees Celsius the hull fails. The gel expands explosively into a foam, cools within a fraction of a second and sets in that shape, turning the kernel inside out. High-speed filming found that the flake pushes off the hot surface with a small starchy leg and jumps, and that the familiar bang is the sound of vapour escaping rather than the hull splitting.
The kernels left at the bottom of the bowl are usually the ones that leaked. A hairline crack in the hull, or a kernel dried out in storage, lets steam escape gradually so nothing builds up.
Butterfly or mushroom
Flakes come in two commercial shapes. Butterfly flakes are the irregular winged ones from the cinema counter, light, full of surface for salt and butter, and fragile. Mushroom flakes are rounder and denser, and they are what caramel and chocolate coatings are made from, because a winged flake would shatter in the coating drum.
Growers select for the ratio between the two, and popping conditions shift it as well. It is not a matter of kernel quality but of what the foam does in the instant it sets.
How it talked its way into the cinema
Cinemas originally wanted nothing to do with popcorn. It was street food sold from wagons, and carpeted picture palaces thought it beneath them. The Depression changed the arithmetic. Popcorn was one of the few treats people would still buy, vendors set up outside the doors, and theatre owners noticed the money walking past on the pavement. Concessions went from an indignity to the thing keeping the lights on.
The quiz below assigns you a snack on seven questions and no evidence at all. Popcorn, at least, has earned its place in the lineup.
