Healthy Junk Media and the SnackWell Effect

Food made by the Devil himself

In 2022, we happily left SnackWell’s brand cookies behind. The product was discontinued last year. Good riddance.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have encountered these dubious treats, SnackWell’s was a brand of cookies that emerged during the 1990s heroin chic low-fat diet era. Every Clinton era kid tasted the signature Devil’s Food cookie cakes at least once. Our moms bought them en masse along with Susan Powter diet books and Richard Simmons exercise tapes.

SnackWell’s cookies promised consumers healthy indulgence without the threat of weight gain. You could have your cake, eat it too, and not gain an ounce. They lied to us.

First off, they tasted bad. Even to a chunky kid with an unsophisticated palate, they were gross. They had a weird aftertaste. They did not scratch that junk food itch the way a candy bar or a fistful of Oreos did.

And they weren’t really healthy, either. These were cookies after all, a food famously lacking in vitamins and minerals. Maybe SnackWell’s cookies were low in fat, but they were high in carbohydrates and sugar. And dietary fat turned out not to be the nutritional boogeyman we thought it was. Fat makes you feel full so you stop eating; sugar and carbs do not.

Since SnackWell’s didn’t have the flavor or the fat to satisfy, and because they were marketed as a healthier alternative to real cookies, dieters ended up eating way more of them, consuming more calories overall than they would have if they’d just grabbed a brownie instead. Social commentators dubbed this “The SnackWell Effect.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trashing junk food. I love junk food. I love curly fries. I love mozzarella sticks. I love cookies and cakes—the real kind, not the gross reduced fat kind. I simply do not delude myself into thinking that these things will make me healthy or thin. I eat them well aware that they are not great for me, just as I know that an occasional cocktail is not great for my liver, or that smoking an occasional joint is not great for my lungs, or that playing a video game is not great for my back. So be it. The things that make life bearable often make it shorter.

We cannot ask junk food to make us healthier people. It’s not fair to them or to ourselves. They’re not meant to do that. They’re meant to be fun. That’s all.

So why do we ask that of junk media?

Healthy Junk Media

There’s a bewildering contradiction in contemporary pop culture, especially in geek circles. We demand that entertainment must do the following two things simultaneously:

1. Entertainment media must be relentlessly upbeat, triumphalist, escapist fluff that always leaves the viewer with pleasant, uncontradictory emotions.

2. Entertainment media must address and even solve difficult real-world issues like grief, imperialism, rape culture, and genocide.

We want entertainment that does not challenge us or upset us but somehow makes us better citizens. In other words, we want healthy junk food. We want the pop culture equivalent of SnackWell’s cookies.

This is, obviously, not a reasonable demand. There’s not really a fluffy way to deal with a topic like genocide. Genocide is extremely depressing! Attempting to sanitize it produces unsavory results.

Take John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (please!). It’s a novel that spins the Holocaust into an uplifting fictional story about a friendship between a Jewish child imprisoned at Auschwitz and a Nazi officer’s son. Many teachers assign the book to school children as a non-threatening way to teach them about the Shoah. But they shouldn’t. The book inadvertently promotes falsehoods about the Holocaust, and may even make readers more sympathetic to the Nazis. You’re better off assigning Art Spiegelman’s Maus. It’s heavier, yes, but this is a story that needs to be told truthfully without softening it. Unsurprisingly, the less-upbeat Maus has been heavily targeted for censorship by right-wing zealots.

On the speculative side, you could read TJ Klune’s widely-acclaimed The House in the Cerulean Sea. The novel tells the story of a mild-mannered bureaucrat who falls in G-rated same-sex love while running an orphanage for magical monster children. What’s wrong with that, you ask? In an interview, Klune says he drew heavy inspiration from the Sixties Scoop, a genocidal Canadian policy that kidnapped thousands of First Nations children and forced them into Residential Schools where they were beaten, starved, sexually abused, and even killed. The Sixties Scoop is absolutely a story worth telling, but it must be treated with appropriate sensitivity and gravity. Personally, the idea of a white, non-Indigenous writer taking a look at this horrifying campaign of human rights abuses against children and turning it into a twee love story about “kindness” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

“Healthy” junk food media is a clever rhetorical trick that allows the purveyors of low-effort commercial trash to have their cake and eat it, too. Call a superhero movie inconsequential? Ummm, actually, it deals with grief and feminism, so it’s deep and important. But if you examine the way the entertainment product addresses a serious topic—maybe it mishandles an important social issue, or maybe it’s just not very well-crafted, with stodgy dialog and clunky prose? Hey, take it easy! It’s supposed to be popcorn fun! It doesn’t have to be brilliant!

And so the content industry churns out thinkpiece upon thinkpiece about how It’s Actually Really Important Praxis when White Women Masturbate to Snape/Harry Slash, or This Reboot of a 1980s Hasbro Cartoon Designed Solely to Sell Toys is the Feminist Hero We Need Right Now, or Disney Made Yet Another First Openly Gay Character So You Need to Watch It. Marketing and fandom cheerleaders masquerading as cultural critics scream that popcorn entertainment will nourish our souls and, by extension, heal the world.

But it won’t. Of course it won’t. It was never meant to do that.

Toward Better, Purer Junk

There’s nothing wrong with watching fluffy, trashy, escapist entertainment. I love trash media. I love the Final Destination movies, and the Resident Evil games, and Beavis and Butthead, and comedy podcasts, and Let’s Plays, and Wife Swap, and that Hallmark Christmas romantic comedy where Melissa Joan Hart falls in love with a nutcracker who has been magically turned into a man. But I am under no illusion that these things will make me a better person. That’s okay. They don’t have to enlighten me. They only have to waste my time painlessly, and for that task they are adequate.

It’s fine to enjoy junk food media. But we’ve got to stop deluding ourselves into thinking it’s good for us.

Just as the SnackWell Effect encourages us to eat even more empty calories without really nourishing us, I worry that geek poptimism encourages us to consume more shallow, mediocre “wholesome” entertainment instead of challenging ourselves with more difficult media. Art absolutely can open your mind, but it usually takes a little effort to get through it. But that doesn’t make it unsatisfying. Nutritious food can be delicious if it’s cooked right. A dense novel can be incredibly rewarding. A slow-paced film can be wonderfully affecting.

And on the other side, unapologetically indulgent junk is a hell of a lot more satisfying than bland diet junk. Not all junk food is created equal. An In-N-Out cheeseburger is much tastier than a Trekking-Mahlzeiten canned cheeseburger, just as Blade is an unquestionably better vampire flick than Morbius. That a treat is indulgent is no reason to accept blandness or shoddiness—if anything, it’s a reason to demand better quality. If something is going to raise my cholesterol, then it had better be absolutely delicious.

So stop gorging on ‘healthy’ junk food media. Watch, read, or listen to something a little more nourishing. Or, alternately, get a higher standard of junk. Fuck SnackWell’s. Eat some real cake instead.