Snack

A snack is a small portion of food generally eaten between meals. Snacks come in a variety of forms including packaged snack foods and other processed foods, as well as items made from fresh ingredients at home.

Traditionally, snacks are prepared from a number of ingredients commonly available at home without a great deal of preparation. Often cold cuts, fruits, leftovers, nuts, and sweets are used as snacks. With the spread of convenience stores, packaged snack foods became a significantly profitable business.

Snack foods are typically designed to be portable, quick, and satisfying. Processed snack foods, as one form of convenience food, are designed to be less perishable, more durable, and more portable than prepared foods. They often contain substantial amounts of sweeteners, preservatives, and appealing ingredients such as chocolate, peanuts, and specially designed flavors (such as flavored potato chips). Aside from the use of additives, the viability of packaging so that food quality can be preserved without degradation is also important for commercialization.

A snack eaten shortly before going to bed or during the night may be called a "bedtime snack", "late night snack", or "midnight snack".

In 2010, the average Canadian ate 300 snacks. Canadian identity is often associated with snack foods that are sold in Canada due to economic nationalism. Some Canadian snacks include ketchup chips, Smarties, Coffee Crisp, Kinder Surprise, Jos Louis, Big Turk, and Nanaimo bars.

In the United States, a popular snack food is the peanut. Peanuts first arrived from South America via slave ships and became incorporated into African-inspired cooking on southern plantations. After the Civil War, the taste for peanuts spread north, where they were incorporated into the culture of such popular events as baseball games and vaudeville theaters.

Along with popcorn (also of South American origin), snacks bore the stigma of being sold by unhygienic street vendors. The middle-class etiquette of the Victorian era (1837–1901) categorized any food that did not require proper usage of utensils as lower-class.

Pretzels were introduced to North America by the Dutch, via New Amsterdam in the 17th century. In the 1860s, the snack was still associated with immigrants, unhygienic street vendors, and saloons. Due to loss of business during the Prohibition era (1920–1933), pretzels underwent rebranding to make them more appealing to the public. As packaging revolutionized snack foods, allowing sellers to reduce contamination risk, while making it easy to advertise brands with a logo, pretzels boomed in popularity, bringing many other types of snack foods with it. By the 1950s, snacking had become an all-American pastime, becoming an internationally recognized emblem of middle American life.