In 2007, a few months before the launch of the iPhone, journalist Nancy Miller reflected on the ominous impact its predecessor, the iPod, was having on consumer behavior. As a handheld device, the iPod could store bulky album collections, allowing its owners to listen to music on the go. Miller also made a more ominous point, suggesting that Apple’s intentions were more far-reaching: the company was enticing consumers to watch television and movies, play games, and follow the latest fashion trends on the Internet-enabled device, freeing people from being stuck at home when it came to consuming content.
To help readers visualize what this future portended, Miller used candies and snacks as examples. She presented the Mini Oreo, introduced by the multinational corporation Nabisco in 1991, as a revolutionary biscuit. By making the cookie smaller and more portable, it invited consumers to indulge in “constant consumption” regardless of time or place. “We now devour our pop culture,” she quipped, in “the same way we enjoy candy and chips—in conveniently packaged bite-sized nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture—and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).” In this small blog post, I will suggest that “digital snacking” is not necessarily something new—it builds on the model of constant eating pioneered by confectionery companies.
What both “confectionery snacking” and “digital snacking” have in common is not only the extent to which both can take place regardless of time and place, but also the extent to which society fears the impact of constant consumption on children’s health and well-being, with schools and parents imposing limits on where and when children are allowed to consume sweets and information. In much the same way that Apple, Google, Facebook or TikTok strongly shape children’s culture today, modern confectionery companies in their heyday were at the forefront of encouraging children to buy more sweets and snacks than they could possibly eat, a problem that continues to plague countries struggling with the effects of children’s weight. In Japan, for example, this development sparked initiatives that sought to protect children, not only from the unhealthy and artificial ingredients the snacks contained, but also from the aggressive marketing tactics that a capitalist economy exposes children to. Discussions about the content of sweets and snacks, where and when they should be consumed, and how much children should eat are similar to the questions facing a new generation of parents in a digital age where children “graze” on an endless stream of information on their handheld devices.
Parental concern about the negative effects of sweets and snacks is relatively recent, at least in Japan. Thanks in part to the colonization of Taiwan, which became a major supplier of sugar at the end of the nineteenth century, sweets also proliferated and became increasingly affordable for working-class children living in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Osaka. Biomedical knowledge, which distinguished between “good” and “bad” confectionery based on a chemical assessment of the ingredients, alerted parents to the need to police their children’s snacking habits. Combined with the state’s drive to create healthy and powerful bodies fit for a modern nation-state, middle-class parents were furnished with scientific knowledge to monitor children’s snacking habits. It also provided the basis for holding mothers and fathers morally responsible for the health of the country’s future workers, soldiers, and mothers. Indifference to such matters was seen as a sign of “bad” parenting.
For middle class parents, milk caramel, which became one of the most desirable (though not inexpensive) sweets in the 1920s, was the ideal snack. Introduced by Morinaga, the pioneering manufacturer of Western-style sweets and candies (yōgashi), the appeal of milk caramel lay in its modernity. Compared to native sweets and snacks (wagashi)—which were mostly made by hand in supposedly primitive and dirty places of production—automated machines produced milk caramel (along with cookies and chocolates) in large industrial factories where female workers, who looked to contemporaries like hospital nurses, helped mass manufacture hygienic sweets for a national, as opposed to a local, market. Biomedical approval further enhanced the reputation of milk caramel: yōgashi was ranked above wagashi because the former was believed at the time to contain more nutritious animal-derived ingredients such as milk and butter, as opposed to the latter, which was made primarily from nutritiously deficient plant-based ingredients.
Newspaper advertisements, which modern confectionery manufactures took full advantage of, were crucial in communicating the health benefits of eating yōgashi. Morinaga invested heavily in media campaigns that captured consumers’ attention not only with colorful illustrations and catchy phrases, but also by showing how yōgashi, because it was healthy and well-preserved, was a mobile confection that could be taken everywhere, including on school excursions and picnics. Much was made of the portability of milk caramel: it could be taken to the theater, concerts, sporting events, and hiking trips; it could be eaten on public transportation and at work to fuel the activities of modern people—a feat native confectionery could not accomplish because it was less nutritious and more perishable.
A Morinaga advertisement (1935) showing how its milk caramel product was the perfect accompaniment for children going on hikes in the summer. Courtesy of Morinaga & Company
However, the positivity surrounding modern confectionery evaporated in the post-war era. As sweets and snacks flooded the market, overconsumption of cakes, caramels, chocolates, or potato chips became a health hazard. Of greater concern to parents was the aggression with which modern confectionery companies invaded the home. Manufacturers such as Morinaga, Meiji, Fujiya and Lotte targeted children directly through media tie-ins with anime programs, which became wildly popular as television became embedded in the home in the 1960s. Potato chips—increasingly marketed to assuage parental concerns about the impact of sugar on children’s health—made matters worse. They became a threat to the sanctity of the family meal—a situation exacerbated by the advent of video games, with which sweets and snacks became natural bedfellows. Even more disturbing to parents was the extent to which manufacturers competed by offering increasingly elaborate and desirable freebies of children’s favorite manga characters, encouraging young people to buy more industrial candies and snacks than they could possibly eat. As a result, society bewailed wasteful sights where confectionery—after the freebies had been removed—lay discarded on the floor or in the gutter.
Faced with the onslaught of confectionery capitalism, society moved to tame its effects. At home, maternal efforts to counteract the impact of invasive marketing witnessed the valorization of homemade sweets and snacks—not just as domestic creations that were cheap and healthy—but as unique and affective incarnations containing an ingredient that commerce could not possibly reproduce in the factory: love. Even working mothers joined in, rising early in the morning to bake cakes and cookies with their daughters for when the children came home from school. Competition with commerce could be tense, as when Fujiya offered ready-made Christmas cakes to entice consumers to buy them as a flavor that promised family happiness, or when chocolate manufacturers exploited Valentine’s Day, another Western custom, to increase sales, both of which challenged women’s ability to hold the attention of children and partners. Baking workshops and cooking schools boomed, promising women cakes, chocolates, or cookie recipes that tugged at the heartstrings of children and men.
In the public sphere, too, efforts were made to push children out of the home—not to keep them in it—and to redirect them to spaces less exposed to confectionery capitalism. In a complete reversal of the first half of the twentieth century, child experts, who had once advised strongly against visits to the penny candy shop, reappraised the dagashiya, which became spaces where children were encouraged to go to regain their innocence, rekindle meaningful social relationships by reconnecting with their peers, and embrace simpler sweets and snacks that were untainted by overt marketing. As natural, plant-based ingredients were re-evaluated, wagashi also experienced a revival, becoming an embodiment of craftsmanship, tradition, and provincial culture, as well as a healthy alternative to yōgashi. Children were also encouraged to eat wagashi in order to reconnect with the country’s confectionery heritage.
The experience of “confectionery snacking” shows how difficult it is to completely control children’s habits and preferences. Limiting consumption to certain times and places was a measure that middle-class parents invariably resorted to in the analog era. However, shielding children from the effects of television has proven more difficult, and the tendencies of confectionery capitalism to use media to infiltrate the domestic sphere and to target children directly have become even more pronounced in the digital era. In the case of sweets in Japan, appeals to maternal love, handmade creations, and the simpler sweets of the past have been used to reduce children’s addiction to industrial confectionery.
A key difference with “digital snacking” is that there is a limit to physical appetites in “confectionery snacking.” In the case of the latter, parents might choose to turn to homemade creations, in which undesirable ingredients can be removed and love ‘injected,’ offering alternatives from which children could choose. Neither can be applied to “digital snacking,” where the appetite for information and communication is almost insatiable, and parents cannot resort to handmade alternatives to replace hand-held devices. Only about 15 years have elapsed since the iPhone was brought to market: it remains to be seen whether newer solutions will emerge as the overconsumption of digital content continues.
