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A snack is a portion of food, often smaller than a regular meal, 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 ingredients commonly available in the home. Often cold cuts, fruit, leftovers, nuts, sandwiches, and the like are used as snacks. The Dagwood sandwich was originally the humorous result of a cartoon character's desire for large snacks. With the spread of convenience stores, packaged snack foods became a significant 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).

Beverages, such as coffee, are not generally considered snacks though they may be consumed along with or in lieu of snack foods.

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

Not Diggin’ the Stacy’s Pesto & Sundried Tomato Pita Chips

So, here’s my review of Stacy’s Pesto & Sundried Tomato Pita Chips:

Couple of stats first:

  • calories/ounce — 133.3
  • % of total calories that come from fat – 30%

PROS:

  1. No trans fat
  2. No cholesterol
  3. High in fiber – you get 11% of your daily recommended fiber in only 1.5oz of food, which is good
  4. Low in sugar

 

CONS:

  1. Chips were too hard. I know this may sound like a strange gripe, maybe it’s because I don’t eat pita chips too often and I’m not familiar with their consistency, but as a snack, it seemed difficult to break some of the pieces of pita in my mouth. It seemed a little like work and I was worried at a few moments that I might break a tooth or something. Admittedly, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but I guess I wasn’t expecting them to be this hard. With Martin’s Pretzels, for example, I expect them to be hard to break and so it’s not a problem. I guess it’s a matter of what I expected.
  2. Taste was flat and bland. I agree that seasonings and flavorings should be subtle and not too overpowering, but I wasn’t getting much of either pesto or sundried tomato flavor coming through at all. I was tasting some seasoning, but it didn’t taste much like pesto or sundried tomato to me and in general, there wasn’t much flavor at all.
  3. Surprisingly, considering that there was little taste, this snack is high in sodium – 380mg, that’s 16% of a 2,000 daily recommended calorie intake in only 1.5oz of food. That’s a lot.
  4. Didn’t fill me up enough. I decided to have some peanut butter with the last few chips to improve the taste, and because I knew the chips alone wouldn’t fill me up enough. I think that it’s reasonable to expect that I should get filled up pretty good if it’s going to cost me 200 calories. So, this snack is calorie-dense, which basically means it is costing me a lot of calories for a relatively small amount of food that I get to eat. Why should I eat a small amount of food that will probably not fill me up and give me a lot of calories. That’s not good sense. Some calorie-dense foods are really tasty and should not be avoided, because we don’t want to deprive ourselves, because then life wouldn’t be any fun. But, eating calorie-dense foods too much of the time isn’t conducive to maintaining a healthy body weight, and, like in this case, if the calorie-dense foods don’t really taste that good, then it just doesn’t make much sense at all. My lovely fiancée gets credit for this concept. She always tells me that she doesn’t want to waste calories on something that she doesn’t really enjoy. She would rather do so on something that she really loves (like dark chocolate!). She’s a smart lady.

CONCLUSION:

  • I know I listed several PROS for this snack, but the number of PROS versus the number of CONS is not always how I measure how well I liked something. The CONS in this case far outweigh the PROS. I was not impressed with this product. I didn’t like the taste, although these would probably work with hummus or peanut butter, but considering how calorie-dense they already are, adding hummus or peanut butter might make for a very high-calorie snack.
  • So, in summary: not much tastetoo many caloriesdidn’t fill me up. It was easy, not tasty, not very unhealthy, but certainly not healthy.
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