The First Junk Food

Wandering through the supermarket on Monday I came upon a snack display of what may be the original junk food, a name swimming up out of childhood. Snacks aren’t always a regular item in my shopping basket and apart from Chex Mix and potato chips, what’s available in that line is pretty much a mystery these days. What a surprise to come upon a tall rack of the old Cracker Jack snack with Sailor Jack and Bingo still smiling out from the package. Couldn’t stop myself and a bag of this ‘blast from the past’ ended up in my basket.

A German immigrant named Frederick Rueckheim arrived in Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 to work on the massive clean up of the city. When not busy with the clean up he and his brother Louis sold popcorn from a cart. They came up with an idea of combining candy, popcorn and peanuts and the first Cracker Jack snack was born. The Rueckheim’s original mixture was made up of popcorn, peanuts and molasses, and rather blandly called “Candied Popcorn and Peanuts.” It was a small street cart business for a number of years, their product not made in very large quantities.

The Rueckheim brothers first mass-produced and sold their product at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and it was a big success, with the exception of one problem: the popcorn stuck together in chunks because of the molasses. It took three years but Frederick finally came up with a solution by adding a small amount of oil to each batch as it was mixed in a large drum. Around the same time a customer unwittingly came up with the name Cracker Jack, when he exclaimed after a mouthful, “That’s crackerjack!” using an idiom of the time meaning ‘of excellent quality.’

In 1899, businessman Henry Eckstein developed a wrapping he called the ‘wax sealed package’ or the ‘Eckstein triple proof package’— a revolutionary new paper package that kept dust, germs, and moisture out. A few years following this the company was reorganized as Rueckheim Bros & Eckstein. The snack became a favorite at baseball games and in 1908 Cracker Jack achieved immortality via the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Jack Norworth wrote the lyrics to the song and first came up with the line, “Buy me some peanuts and a Tootsie Roll” but felt that just didn’t work. He came up with the alternative, “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.” The song is still sung during the seventh-inning stretch at most baseball games.

Prizes were first included in Cracker Jack boxes in 1912 and the mascots Sailor Jack and Bingo were introduced in 1918, becoming official a year later. Sailor Jack is based on Rueckheim’s eight year-old nephew who died of pneumonia shortly after his image appeared on boxes. Interestingly, the image of Sailor Jack & Bingo is carved on Frederick Rueckheim’s tombstone.

The company was sold to the Borden Food Corporation in 1964 and bought by Frito-Lay 1997.

Made To Mix

For a long time a popular brand of potato chips used the slogan ‘Betcha can’t eat just one.’ Probably a serious challenge for many potato chip lovers, and a great come-on for a snack product. It must have been successful because Lay’s continued to use the slogan for forty-five years. Nothing against potato chips; I have definitely eaten my share of them, but the ‘Betcha can’t eat just one’ challenge doesn’t describe my taste for any of the many different brands and flavors. Easy enough to turn my back on a bowl of potato chips after only one, or even none. Potato chips that is.

I wasn’t long back in the US from some years abroad when my ignorance of a popular snack surprised a roomful of people at a party. Chomping my way through a bowl of something crunchy in that bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one mode, I said to my friend the host, “What is this stuff? It’s pretty good. Where’d you get it?” Two or three turned to me with a look of disbelief. One wanted to know if I’d been locked away in prison, another asked—as if Mars were a possibility—“Where do you come from?” My friend stepped in to answer for me, then wondered, “Don’t they have Chex Mix in Japan?” Mmm…do they? Maybe, but I never ran across it in my time there.

But from the moment of that first mouthful, ask and I’ll tell you that Chex Mix is the Rolls Royce of the snack world. Proof is in, I definitely can’t eat just one, or one handful. Might be better on trips to the market for me to avoid the aisle with Chex Mix. The temptation is to buy one bag of all fifteen varieties. The best of the bunch is the Chipotle Chex Mix, but I’ve found that only once and it isn’t listed on the Chex Mix homepage. Maybe it was a trial market.

In 1952 fans of Wheat Chex and Rice Chex breakfast cereals began mixing the two, following directions on the box and adding a few other crunchy tidbits, making their own party snack. The photo at the top is a Chex advertisement from the June 16, 1952 issue of Life Magazine. At the bottom right is a recipe for party mix. Origins of the snack are tied to the introduction of television, when people mesmerized by the new technology wanted snacks that could be eaten without interrupting a television show. I missed all of this, maybe because Chex cereals were not popular in my family or circle of acquaintances, or maybe in the 1950s everyone I knew happily watched I Love Lucy and Burns and Allen without any thought to snacks.

The first Chex Mix snack packs didn’t appear on US market shelves until 1985. By then I was long gone and learning to like far eastern alternatives like Tongari Corn and Pocky Sticks.

It’s a regular these days but if you’d asked me a year ago I wouldn’t have known Chex Mix from Anna Nicole Smith. Now I’ve got the first part but I’m still trying to figure out who Anna Nicole Smith is.