Popcorn has always played more of a symbolic role in my life than a dietary one. On family movie nights, it sat warm in a big white melamine bowl on the coffee table as my dad fiddled with the VHS player; later, during my internship at an alternative newsweekly, popcorn was a late-night dinner staple for an editor I admired, becoming linked in my mind with all that is true and good about journalism. I like to watch people eat it at the movies, pondering the Pavlovian compulsion that it inspires in loved ones—even if it’s stale and awful and covered in fake butter, even if we’ve just had a filling meal. There’s something very American about all of these associations—the cinephilic childhood, the hard work, the mindless snacking. But I hardly ever eat popcorn myself, at the movies or otherwise: Philosophically I’m not the biggest fan of processed corn products; and as appealing as good, salty, buttery kernels can be, there just always seems to be something else I’d rather eat instead. (Caramel corn and popcorn with nuts are another story.)
Two things happened last week to make me question my outlook. The first was that I got an email from Nick Thompson, a Wired editor who does gadget testing for the Today Show. He was preparing to do a segment about popcorn makers and needed to test a bunch of different options beforehand—but Wired, a magazine devoted mainly to non-culinary technology, doesn’t have stoves in its offices, so he asked if he could come to the Gourmet test kitchen a few floors down and borrow one of our stovetops. We were happy to oblige, and I was curious to see if the experience would add a spark to my cordially distant relationship with the snack. Could the right corn from the right popper turn me into one of those “average Americans” who eats 70 quarts of popcorn a year?
I hung around the kitchen and helped out as Thompson and his colleague Daniel Roth tested four poppers: an old-fashioned, hand-cranked Whirley-Pop; a Cuisinart electric popper with a plastic dome top that turns into a handy serving bowl; a classic, cheap little air-popper; and a ceramic model that you stick in the microwave. The three of us agreed that the Cuisinart blew the others out of the water, including the Whirley-Pop, which had received high marks in other publications. The Cuisinart produced kernels that were light and fluffy, with the perfect crunch and a slightly caramelized, roasted corn flavor; with a little butter and salt they were hopelessly addictive. The Whirley-Pop’s kernels were perfectly round but sort of hard and pockmarked, as though they’d been exposed to very intense heat. (And indeed, that’s what had happened: The Whirley-Pop was designed to be churned constantly while the kernels heat, not to be intermittently tended and forgotten while people flit from popper to popper; when properly managed during rehearsals on the set, Thompson told me later, the Whirley came out ahead.)
The Wired guys left us with a big bag of the Cuisinart-popped corn as a thank-you gift. A few hours later I was back at my desk, working late, crunching the delicious kernels a bit mindlessly and feeling connected by a long popcorn chain across the country to my former editor.
The next day, a second thing happened: I read an article about British movie theatres banning popcorn. As the BBC’s Stephen Robb reports, the UK’s largest art-house chain, Picturehouse Cinemas, is doing a trial of “popcorn-free screenings” at one of its theatres, following the lead of other British chains. “Popcorn is a contentious issue,” a Picturehouse rep told Robb. “Lots of people absolutely hate it and have asked us to ban it.” Why hate popcorn? “Noisy, messy and downmarket, seems to be the accusation being made within the cinema industry,” Robb writes. Downmarket? As the artistic director of another London indie theatre puts it, popcorn is “a form of junk food... that encourages junk entertainment.”
Messy I can understand, and noisy is a stretch, but calling popcorn junk food is just outdated: As any smart nutritionist will tell you these days, the fact that the industrialized version of a given food is unhealthy doesn’t impugn the food as a whole. Real popcorn is low in calories (and surprisingly low in carbohydrates, for what it is), high in fiber, and nearly fat-free; even the oil-popped stuff is relatively low in fat, provided you don’t eat seven cups of it at a time. Yes, there’s a lot of bad popcorn out there, full of nasty additives that cause popcorn lung, but that’s from artificial butter flavoring, not from the real stuff. (Side note: I have no idea how any of it could encourage junk entertainment.) And while most movie-theater popcorn is made from subsidized corn that costs less than the bag it comes in, many farmers markets and small producers sell good-quality popcorn—the tasteful art-house proprietor is not without alternatives. Plus, subsidized or not, popping corn (in my opinion) is a much better crop for farmers to be growing than the type of corn used for corn syrup, cattle feed, or ethanol.
Speaking of subsidies, popcorn basically subsidizes movie tickets, allowing more people to go to theatres (including the art houses) more often: Concessions account for about 40 percent of theatres’ profits, because while ticket revenues have to be shared with film distributors, concession revenues belong to the theatre alone. Instead of doing away with popcorn, cinemas should just start serving the real stuff, bumping those $7 bags up to $10 if they must—and dealing with any messiness by hiring a few extra people to clean up between shows. Lord knows most theatres could use that anyway.
The more I found myself defending popcorn against the attacks of highfalutin British cinephiles, the more I started to like it. What really pushed me over the edge was learning that during the Depression, “popcorn, at ten cents a bag, was one of the few luxuries poorer families could afford.” The humble, healthy, joy-inspiring snack came to the rescue again during World War II, when sugar rationing made candy so scarce that Americans tripled their popcorn consumption. I might just triple mine, too—this country could use more conscientious corn eaters.