What A Snack Mix Ritual Reveals

About an hour into a flight last week from California to New York City, I noticed when the young lady across the aisle from me settled in to watch the in-flight movie. She was an otherwise attractive young woman in her early 30s, whose ill-fitting white slacks did not flatter her. First she donned an over-sized neck pillow.  Then she pulled out a party-sized bag of Gardetto's Snack Mix from her carry-on luggage.


She proceeded to eat the entire bag methodically while watching the film, one piece at a time.  She held the bag in her left hand and, as she ate each bite with her right, she would begin shaking the bag rhythmically in her left hand, the way a child might shake a box of Cracker Jacks to get at the prize, or a box of cereal to find the toy inside.

She did this over an over again, one piece of snack mix at a time for maybe a half hour or so until the entire bag was empty.   What was she doing, I wondered? (Several times.)  Was she systematically eating only the pretzels first, and then, say, all the cheese puffs next?

There was something in the practiced, casual way she shook that bag (and ate its entire contents) which told me this wasn't her first party-sized Gardetto's snack mix.  I also found myself making other unflattering inferences about her, extrapolating from her neck pillow and from the fact that she had thought in advance to pack a party-sized bag of snack mix for her flight.