On a recent night, while the dulcet tones of “The Great British Baking Show” cooed in my periphery, I took a short break from gingerly chopsticking perfectly crisp, airy, and chewy-at-the-center puffs of home-popped corn kernels into my mouth to Google “Is popcorn a vegetable?” The Internet, it turns out, is full of people who want to know (or maybe just want to believe that it is), and message-board dwellers are eager to cite technicalities classifying the foodstuff variously as a vegetable, a fruit, and a grain. It’s not altogether surprising, considering that popcorn was touted as a diet food in the eighties, with its own dubious recipe book and the commonsense advice that you can eat as much plain popcorn as you want and still lose weight. Never mind that undressed, air-popped kernels offer all the satisfaction of a bowlful of packing peanuts.
In this installment of The New Yorker’s Annals of Obsession video series, we take a deeper look into the history and technology behind this versatile snack. For many, popcorn is indelibly linked to movie theatres and to the ambient buttery goodness of the lobby. At Cinépolis Chelsea, golden orbs of popped corn rain down onto beds of the same in glass machines, each one its own glorious ecosystem. “They get you as soon as you walk in the door. It’s the smell. It gets me every time,” Spence, a customer at the theatre, says. To achieve the room-filling scent and signature taste-bud-assailing butter flavor of movie-theatre popcorn, cinemas use a product called Flavacol, a sandlike substance whose only resemblance to dairy is its paper-carton packaging. Flavacol is cheaper and easier to manipulate than real butter, and when the food designer and “supertaster” Sarah Masoni samples a bit of the aromatic additive, it makes her rock back on her heels, exclaiming, “Whoa!” The sodium content—in a mere teaspoon, more than a hundred per cent of the recommended daily amount—also stuns.
At home, on the stovetop, popcorn requires fewer chemicals and more active listening. The anticipation builds as the oil comes to temperature and the first tinny pop rings out. Next, there’s the cackling of kernels, a twangy banjo exchange, and finally a rat-a-tat assault of pillowy, edible bullets that eventually gives way to the last dull thuds, the late bloomers muffled by a cushion of fully formed popcorn clouds. These aural pleasures are so well established that the Aztecs have an onomatopoeic word for the sound of several kernels popping at once: totopoca. Robin Dando, a professor of food science at Cornell University, says, “The future of food design is multisensory. . . . You can imagine, for instance, popcorn that has a certain coloration to it and all of a sudden it tastes sweet without us needing to put sugar in it.” But it doesn’t require an engineer to make popcorn a multisensory experience. Just add heat, and it’ll sing you a song.
