Unidentified Snack-Mix, Orange and Salty (Last Seen Possibly Becoming The Christ)

by Braeden Collins

I.

One compulsion that I feel helpless to perform is researching facts about the food I eat, on my phone, while I eat the food in question. If I’ve ever been asked why I do this–and I have not; this is a behaviour I only do in isolation–I would say that I am affirming that the food I eat contributes to my health and well-being. Clear skin, unfettered joints, placid guts. For example, I’ve been told a million times that, say, broccoli is a boon to my health; but I did not know that it contained an abundance of Vitamin K until I went online and searched “broccoli health benefits.” Later, I would also learn what Vitamin K was. The internet is astonishing.

Other times I focus instead on researching a food’s history, their place in our culture. Avoiding acknowledgment of the insalubrity of some foods is the true goal here–finding listicles about accelerated mortality via french fries is gratefully difficult–but, after exhausting nutritional information, I’ll poke around for facts like how and when avocados became prevalent–at least, when they took off in the Canadian prairies; I cannot remember people eating them when I was a child. I still don’t have a great accounting of how suddenly all of my friends knew how to make guacamole, but it was interesting to note how the most popular variety, Haas, is descended from a single tree in California, first cultivated by a postal delivery man in the 1930‘s. That could be false. I can’t be bothered to fact-check. But it sounds right. ^[1]

I engaged in this compulsion the other night while I was eating a snack mix. One with a medley of pretzels, corn-chips, and other various yellow and orange fried goods. I refuse to name the brand. I also refuse to detail my self-righteous reasons for anonymizing my case study. It was a mindless snacking session; my phone was already in my hand, so the pull of Wikipedia was difficult to resist. Micro-expectations had already formed, just beyond my awareness, for the forthcoming article. Things like date of introduction, list of flavours, cultural references, and other biographical data would be within. In some ways, my data consumption was now tailored to Wikipedia, their patterns of information. Footnotes and citations would be there to fortify things. I’d learn about endorsements from athletes, infamous ad campaigns, retired mascots. There was comfort in all these things, like I was placing my isolated act of snacking in my recliner, alone in a small room, into a framework of collective experience. I wanted to confirm my own anecdotes with the rest of the world and mentally shake hands with people, mining nostalgia from shared plaster in our hearts.

No article found. Feeling my heart rate rise, possibly from all the salt, I reconfigured my search query. Nothing again. The only mention of this snack mix was found in a list of products produced by the mythically-large parent conglomerate, where the snack mix was presented greyed-out and null–that is, it lacked any hyperlink to a new page, connective tissue toward further information. For a moment, I started to doubt my own sense of its cultural significance, as though Wikipedia was playing a trick on me. How could there be articles for small train stations in Croatia, huddled in the pines–but not for this venerable snack-mix?

As far as I am aware, the snack mix is widely known and consumed; it is a cornerstone of my gas station shelf, the refreshments tables at parties when I was a child. All the other snack mixes appear as counterfeits of the dominant, superior variety that I was eating, lacking in every category and criteria except perhaps price. Here, the popular axiom “you get what you pay for” is sustained. I can even recall schoolyard myths centering around the product, including allegations that it shared a production facility with communion wafers. I went to a Catholic school. We debated, half-sarcastically, over whether or not the snack mix could be used as a substitute for transubstantiation, as though it had leached some of the sacrament from another conveyor belt.

Not yet discouraged, although piqued by the exclusion, I went back to the search engine and refined my search query into more general terms. An official product page was presented, from the website of that same colossal overhead company. I disregarded it; it only existed to sell me the product. Dense with marketing prestidigitation, the colours on the page seemed to spring from a different prism altogether. I believe we have a intuition for tricks and inauthenticity.

Back on the search results again, after scrolling past a long index of purchasing options, I found an independent, wiki-style encyclopaedia that focused on archiving snack food data. I figured this would be my best bet. As I wandered onto their website, I thought about the kind of people who spend their time collecting this information. Voluntarily, I presumed. Is this the only productive output available for my useless knowledge on foods? I could see that someone would find it to be a wasteful use of time.

On some television programs, I have seen food historians before. Surely there can only be a few dozen of those people before the field is saturated. I lack the confidence that my compulsion has enough momentum to be pivoted into a career. In a sense I felt I had found my kin, these demi-archivists on the little wiki, but they were out of reach, concealed with anonymous usernames. It made me hate them, for allowing a gulf between themselves and me, for being too similar to that part of myself I didn’t like to reveal.

Anyway, these feelings were entrenched when I found the page for my snack-mix. What good-will the website had developed by just granting admission to the snack-mix was diminished by a paucity of information. Across a single paragraph, I gathered this: that the snack mix was first introduced in 1987... and then some sundry details about some of the available varieties. Even this was not comprehensive. Among the unlisted flavours: BBQ, Spicy, Cheddar. There must be others, but then the confusion of brand dissimilarity between the USA and my own Canadian counterpart arises. The article was clearly written from an American perspective; the logos and the recollection of certain flavours (Ranch) were alien data to me. I felt mocked by the birth claim of 1987; that year glowered at me, unattributed, daring me to deny its authority. There was nothing about transubstantiation. It seemed unlikely that the contributors would have fabricated the information–what is there to gain?–but I had to press on. While my stomach may have been satisfied at this point, I had another vacuous need that was swallowing up the fringes of my senses.

II.

Matters were taken into my own hands. We live with enough uncertainty as it is; I believe that the gathering of mundane enigmata, unsolved, corrodes the little foundation I have built to bear the big-time questions. Climate, tech, whatever. Some can manage to live with these sweeps of ignorance and neglect the little psychic fumaroles that blossom from the unanswered thing–but I can’t include myself in that category. By this time the aforementioned hands had been tattooed in warm orange blots across the fingerprints, speckled with salt and other crunchy detritus. Checking first to ensure nobody was looking through the window, I cleaned each finger with my tongue and dried them on the inside of my shirt. Then I folded the crepitant bag into itself, with dubious adherence. I cannot guess what else I would have intended to do that day.

Now that unctuous official product page had a purpose. In small print at the bottom, there was a menu and an option that said “Contact Us.” I clicked that. There was a solitary phone number under “Customer Relations”, as though the parent entity of the snack mix had one single ingress point for the masses. A little door at the foot of the mountain, pinned with a brass knocker. I called the number and listened to menu options, made a selection, then more menu options. They were read by a computer generated voice, flatly detailing the labyrinth for me. Pressing through the chain of options I ended up being on hold, waiting for a member of the sales team or something. In my estimation, a salesperson should be steeped in the history of their product, nearly merged with its being.

I was on hold for three minutes before a salesperson picked up. She introduced herself as Mila and asked how she could help me. I sighed for some reason; the tone in her voice didn’t inspire confidence. I imagined her at a desk, surrounded by a phalanx of facsimile salespeople–all with a headset weaving around their head and a script on the computer screen. I could hear insectoid hissing in the background and I imagined Mila to be squinting in an overhead fluorescent beam. Determined to overcome my own doubts, I went ahead and asked when their snack-mix product was first introduced. If I had a satisfactory answer to this, I would address the rumours about communion wafers. Finally I would share my own input on new flavours, and how we could avoid using some onerous compounds I had researched previously. This is part of what it means to participate in society.

Mila’s silence made the phone ache and wilt. Without even attempting to answer my questions, she said she would direct me to the Customer Care Squad. Alright, I said, trying to conceal my terror at navigating the menus once again. But Mila was able to directly transfer my line, my abstract packet of being floating through the air and the marrow of the phone lines, to the Customer Square Squad–and I was swiftly connected to Patrick. He answered with the same script and sounded more depleted than Mila had. I shared my question once again and listened to Patrick issue a volley of keystrokes onto a computer.

“Could I have your customer number, please?” he asked. I paused before asking him what he meant by that. He repeated: “Your customer number.” As though it was life data that we carried on our drivers license, alongside eye colour and height. I said I didn’t have one. This was met with more silence. Patrick then announced that he would be putting me on with sales–presumably so they could sell me a customer number.

Before I could protest, the line cut and once again I was greeted by Mila. I just hung up and stared at the wall for a few moments, listening to the afternoon bustle coming in from the window. Poor Mila. It wasn’t her fault. The company was so large that it had cut out its own heritage for the sake of profit margins, discarded it as irrelevant. Obscuring these things–formulations, previous marketing, etc–was an effective way of erasing it from the public consciousness and facilitating the new, cheaper ways production. They cut corners but I still buy the product, persuaded by my own strange personal mythology.

III.

Without a clear path forward, anxiety began to swell within me, the sort that percolates when you’re waiting for a loved one to pull into the driveway. The longer I went without the useless knowledge, the less whole I felt. Desperately I reworded my search a couple more times, this time including the year 1987 or the word transubstantiation, but it did not produce favourable results; only more and more online stores, bargains, bulks, prices, credit cards, customer numbers, boxes, bags, shipping rates, customer services, and shopping carts.

Tormenting myself, I reviewed what I already knew about the product and realized my own lack of citations. These things that I had experienced as truth, my experience of the snack-mix, were effectively untrue without a primary source; personal testimony is forbidden from Wikipedia. I appreciate this boundary. But does a lack of empirical verification reduce my relationship with the snack-mix to something akin to false memory? I feel like an old raconteur, speaking to a half-moon ring of listeners, half-remembering things that actually happened in dreams. Sometimes we say that personal experience is paramount, other times we demand its expunction from the whole process–it muddies the waters of dead observation and proves absolutely nothing. The communion wafer connection, I conceded, sounded like the sort of bullshit that adolescents conjure up; invented for amusement or passed along from an older sibling as verifiable fact, but losing half of it’s structure and detail in the transfer. But I was having a hard time accepting that the product was little more than something to be sold to me, completely detached from its own antecedents. The implications for my own sense of belonging were alarming.

I decided to go for a walk to soften things. It was hot, with sunlight slanting through the tree canopies on the boulevard. Seeing the houses and the cars enervated me further. I wanted to ask the people inside what they thought about the snack-mix, how it influenced their own trajectories. Imagining their faces afterward triggered enough feelings of humiliation to prevent myself from acting. There was a reason the only other people who sought this knowledge made themselves anonymous; it was a poorly understood interest. Self-victimization here isn’t the intention, but I hope that my disclosure will encourage others to accept their intense need to document and hoard data on the trace ephemera of our lives.

I went into the corner-store at the end of the block, a little white building owned by a local woman. Old sun-rent signs for discontinued products hung in the windows, bordering the flashing neon sign that said OPEN. This sight alone brought me some comfort. Whereas the proprietor likely left them up out of laziness, I saw it as a tether to some predecessor, museum-like. I thought how this insouciance of hers might be what kept her in business, despite the competition from the chain stores. By this point, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was thinking anymore. The profundity of my thoughts was getting questionable. It was very hot.

Inside the drink coolers rumbled along the wall, exhibiting their jugs and bottles. Between those and the door were a few rows of shelves stuffed with candy, chips, magazines–cascading over each other in mounds. White price tags dotted the whole room like eyes. In one of the aisles, an older man was dragging a dolly, stacked with boxes, and leveraging it with a booted heel. He was wearing a bright orange shirt, embossed with a logo on the breast. The ocular offense of the garment was mediated by his pale, shy demeanour. Nothing in his features suggested a desire for attention or exhibition; he looked down and away as he tore open boxes and stocked the shelves, his lips pursed. Each bag was deftly deposited in place, accompanied by the occasional pen stroke on a pad of paper. Uncertain of what to buy, and realizing that I didn’t know why I was in there in the first place, I moved through the store with faux-purpose, listening to the ripping of boxes and gentle rustle of the delivery man handling the bags. I happened to look back over as the delivery man was unloading the final box.

It was the snack-mix. I felt like a fish on a line, tugged by the unexpected coincidence. Automatically placing the items on the shelf, the delivery man seemed cognitively absent. I evaluated him quietly from a rack of beef jerky and determined that he probably did not want to talk, that he had several more deliveries to make. I imagined that he had a van backed up to the rear of the building. His white exoskeleton. He exhaled firmly, as though he sensed that I was watching him, although I was pretending to watch the door to the bathroom.

Holding my breath, I approached. I didn’t introduce myself. I just laid out my question simply for him and preemptively apologized for being a bother. There was sweat on my back. Kneeling beside the rack, the delivery man looked up at me without an expression, something that suggested neither disturbance nor interest. Hypertensive redness mottled his face, graying hair fanned his temples. He seemed lost in thought for a moment before speaking.

“Well,” he said, “I can remember [the snack-mix] being first introduced in 1990. That was the summer my son was born.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to insult him by asking for proof. Continuing, I asked about changes he could recall over the years. He frowned at first, probably at the strangeness of my behaviour, but I think he appreciated having someone tap his brain for this stuff. Close to his retirement, it might have seemed that these recollections would fade and be lost, abandoned with most of the other artifacts of his working life. People like to bequeath knowledge. He then detailed what thebags used to look like, how the colour schemes changed. With a grin, he remembered a honey flavour they had introduced in the late 1990‘s that was discontinued. He told me it was his favourite. Realizing I remembered this too, I did a little felicitous wave with my hands and confirmed the mixture they used. Peanuts were in there. The delivery man nodded.

We seemed to have a good rapport, and he never once checked his watch or indicated that he was annoyed with my inquisition. So I asked about the transubstantiation. I could feel some deep cellular discharge within me as I asked the question, anticipating the closure of a mystery I had been overturning in my head for at least two decades. I felt the school friends leaning in around me, listening intently. The delivery man wrinkled his nose while I explained the relevant context.

“Sure, it could be possible. Back in those days, the production facilities were all cheek to cheek. Out east. And they’re under the same company, ultimately. So it could’ve happened, but I would have no way to confirm that for you.”

He tapped the logo on his breast when he said company. The oceanic conglomerate.

“But if [the snack-mix] is the communion wafer, then what did they say was the wine?” he asked. He looked me in the eye with humour. Taken aback by receiving all the information, and to have found someone with a pulse, not just an avatar, to field my questions and exchange the useless information I craved–I barely registered this comment of his, but it darted itself into some cleft in my gray matter, waiting to be considered at another time.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. The schoolyard friends hadn’t accounted for this.

The delivery man reached into his pocket, produced a card, and handed it to me.

“Well, I don’t have the answer for you either. I hope I answered the other things well enough. But if you want to know more, just give our customer service line a call.”

After shaking my hand, he spun the empty dolly around, loaded it with flattened boxes, and disappeared into a back room. I wish I could’ve communicated the burden he had lifted for me; he was a breathing citation. I bought a different kind of snack from the conglomerate and threw away the card in the garbage bin outside.

Braeden Collins is a writer based in the frozen prairie in Manitoba, Canada. Rather than succumb to the usual torpor of small-town life, he chose to pursue writing as an inventive way of losing money and sanity.  He is a proud, card-carrying member of the Unemployed and hopes to one day make somebody cry through his work rather than his actions.