The Popcorn Issue

Have you ever gone to a movie and not gotten popcorn? I did once and let me tell you I regretted it for years and years afterwards. Going to a movie and not ordering a fifteen dollar tub of buttery heaven is like eating peanut butter without jelly, or macaroni without cheese, or ice cream without beer. It’s an affront to nature.

You can make popcorn at home, too, but let’s face it, it’s never going to turn out like real movie theater popcorn. I don’t know what they do to it that makes it the way it is, but it ranks right up there with the secret formula for Coca-Cola. (I probably don’t even want to know, since I’m sure it’s illegal.) So if you’re willing to settle for second best, go ahead and make some at home.

Suffice it to say, home-popcorn-popping technology has changed quite a bit over the years. Let’s take a look at the various options:

• Manually. When I was growing up, this is how we made it. You poured a cup of oil into a big pot, added the popcorn, then stood there and shook it like a Polaroid picture. After thirty minutes of this the corn would begin to pop. About thirty seconds after the corn began to pop, it would blow the lid off the pot. The popcorn was then eaten directly off the stove top.
• Hot Air. This was the first big advance in popcorn-making technology that I remember. And by “advance in technology” I mean “stupid idea.” The concept is simple: pour popcorn kernels into a blistering hot air stream, and they’ll pop just fine without all that tasteless, yucky oil. If this is your idea of a great bowl of popcorn, I might suggest you run packing peanuts under a hair dryer for a similarly tasty treat.
• Under a Clear Dome. The Stir Crazy actually had some potential. It did, in principle, employ the same basic approach as the manual method. Except all the manualness was removed by the ingenious inclusion of rotating TV antennae to take the place of the half hour of shaking. You used oil, like mother nature intended, and it had an extra special butter melting feature on top. What more could you want?
• Radio Transmissions. What more could you want? How about hands-free popcorn in three minutes! Enter the microwave. By using radio waves in certain special band of the electromagnetic spectrum, you can excite the water molecules in the corn kernels to make them a splode. Here’s what really happens, though, at a microscopic level: the radio waves surround each kernel and put it into a small stainless steel pot. They add oil and shake for three minutes until each kernel is perfectly cooked. Caution: Contents Will Be Lawsuit-Inducingly Hot.

So what’s the issue? I did, after all, title this post, “The Popcorn Issue.” Well, it’s all about tracking the nutritional value of the puffy white snack. There are two major problems:

1. You never know how much you really eat.
2. And even if you did, you don’t know what it’s caloric content is.

When we go to the movies we eat buckets of the stuff. I couldn’t tell you if I down ten cups or a hundred cups during a typical film. It’s physically impossible to know what a “cup” is. It’s so light and airy. I’ve seen calorie-tracking web sites call this anywhere from twenty to two-hundred calories.

Orville Redenbacher is no help either. For some reason these people like to tell you the nutritional value of a serving called, “Two Tablespoons of Unpopped Kernels.” Huh…? How many people rip open the uncooked bag and start munching away? I mean, look at this:

The astute popcorn label reader will notice, of course, that they do helpfully give you the nutritional values for the popped version (35 calories). But notice that this is for one cup popped. If you look up where one serving size was last defined, you’ll see it’s actually about 4.5 cups popped. Suddenly your one serving has jumped to nearly 160 calories.

And why don’t they put the number on there that everyone really needs to see: the entire bag. I know that’s how much I eat when I pop a bag myself. Multiply that by another 2.5 and you get nearly 400 calories. Not too bad, as snacks go, but certainly more than the “35” calories they suggest is in a “serving.”

So Happy Friday, everyone. That means it’s new movie night and the popcorn is calling. Or, if you want to save it up for a special occasion, there are only sixty-one days left until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is out.