Explainer: A brief history of popcorn and its cinema snack sidekicks
An exploration of popcorn's journey from an ancient snack to the world's favourite cinema treat traces its rise alongside the film industry. The article also highlights regional movie snacks, including choc tops in Australasia and roasted ants in Colombia
Waikato: An outing to the cinema isn’t just about seeing a movie, it is a full sensory experience, with a big screen and big snacks. An epic film demands the panoramic widescreen, thunderous surround sound, embarrassingly large boxes of lollies and giant buckets of popcorn that never taste the same at home.
Throughout the history of cinema, however, popcorn has been both scorned as a messy lowbrow distraction and hailed as a profit-making saviour for a floundering film industry.
Popcorn as an ancient snack food
Popcorn is one of the oldest foods we still consume as a snack, with archaeological evidence from Peru, circa 6,700 years ago.
Bernabe Cobo, a Jesuit missionary in Peru in the early 17th century, observed popcorn being made by the local people, toasted until it burst – eaten as a confection called Pisancalla.
French explorers in the Great Lakes region of North America in 1612 saw the Iroquois people heating corn kernels in a clay pot filled with hot sand until they popped – and added them to a soup.
Colonists adopted the practice in the Americas, either using an enclosed wire mesh basket over open flame, or a horizontally mounted thin metal cylinder turned with a hand crank in front of a fireplace.
First bites at the fairground
In 1885, a new steam-powered automatic popcorn machine was invented in Chicago by Charles Cretors cooking kernels in a combination of vegetable oil and animal fat.
He exhibited his invention at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, and by 1900 he had switched to electricity, and machines shifted from street carts to shops.
Popcorn and peanuts were already popular at fairgrounds when moving pictures joined the lineup of entertainments on offer, and the snacks followed the audience into the theatre.
The cinema developed from fairground attraction to a destination in its own right in 1896. Nickelodeons (a nickel for admission, and odeon means theatre in Greek), or “penny gaffs” in Britain, offered inexpensive viewing venues.
By the 1920s, owners tried to establish film theatres as more refined spaces, “movie palaces” with carpets and furnishings normally associated with highbrow entertainment.
Patrons munching on popcorn or peanuts did not match the sophisticated ambience of the new architecturally designed spaces. The noisy crunch of snacks also interfered with watching a silent film.
An affordable luxury
In 1927 the first motion picture with sound, The Jazz Singer, opened in New York. “Talkies” revived the movie business, and popcorn was less of a noisy distraction with a film’s soundtrack.
The Great Depression in the 1930s meant many luxuries were beyond the reach of most people, but a movie ticket was still affordable, and a 5-cent bag of popcorn drew audiences into the theatres, boosting sales.
Initially, cinema owners leased space in the lobby or outside to vendors, until they realised that the profit margin for popcorn was over 70%.
During the second world war, rationing of sugar meant that many types of candy were not available or became expensive.
Popcorn was a cheap substitute and consumption went up 300%.
Popcorn’s sidekicks
Popcorn in the cinema is popular around the world, with a sweet and savoury divide, often drawing on local flavours.
Spicy masala blends are popular in India; Japanese popcorn may include bits of umami-rich seaweed; caramel popcorn dominates the Chinese market.
And while popcorn is clearly a main character, ice cream is a trusty sidekick in the movie snack combo.
In Australian cinemas in the 1930s, “ice cream matinees” gave a free ice cream “bucket” to each child attending. In addition to these cups of ice cream, “Eskimo pies” – chocolate-coated blocks of ice cream – were a popular treat served from trays by usherettes strolling through the aisles of the theatre at the interval.
Ice cream cones dipped in a hard chocolate coating debuted in Australia in the 1940s but did not appear in movie theatres until the early 1980s.
The choc top remains an essential item for moviegoers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, but it is unknown beyond Australasia.
Some local offerings, however, are not just variations on familiar favourites.
Salty Dutch liquorice is a sweet-meets-savoury taste that not everyone acquires, but roasted ants in Colombia are a next-level delicacy at the movies.
Hormigas culonas (translated literally as big-bottomed ant) are a species of leaf-cutter ant, Atta laevigata. In Colombia’s Santander region the ants are a luxury item, the caviar of Colombia. The legs and wings of the queen ants are removed and the bodies are roasted to create a crunchy, high-protein food offering as much adventure in your snack as on the screen.
But whether it be popcorn or ants, the food we eat in the dark while we watch a movie is an essential element of attending the cinema for many people.
The aroma of the butter topping and the crunch of the choc top are sensory experiences that, like the big screen, just aren’t the same at home.
