We now snack,13 on average per person, 580 calories a day—or about a quarter of what we eat. And our snacking has meshed perfectly with the rest of our processed food that is engineered to be cheap and convenient, too. We don’t snack on carrots that we have to buy, lug home, wash, peel, slice, and then bag. The food companies got us to snack on the contents of little cellophane bags, wrapped bars, sippy boxes, microwavable pouches, and those squeezable tubes of yogurt and fruit puree, most of which we could buy on the fly.
