13. Bobby
Something about snacks and feeling safe
I don’t know why they are called Bobby: those huge yellow deep-fried tubes with bubbled, honeybomb interior matrix of a cheeto and the mouth-burning aftertaste of too much salt. I do know that, like with Bugles, if you haven’t stuffed each of your fingers into a bobby and waved your hand around, you are taking life too seriously.
On the one hand, bobby are kind of ubiquitous (like the omnipresent, forever-shelf-stable cream roll). But also bobby show up in weirder and more marginal places. A snack shop will have them, but so will a guy standing between the lanes at a tollbooth hawking bags of bobby from an open cardboard box. You can get stale, unloved bobby at the fancy grocery store on a bottom shelf below Soy Crisps and Pringles; the cigarette stall outside my housing complex has a row of bags tucked on a shelf: the only food available. Bobby have no web presence. They are everywhere, but they aren’t “a thing.” Bobby are— somehow, I’d love to think more about this— a snack for those on the road, a snack for those in between.
It took me a long time to ever purchase bobby, partially because I am shy and didn’t know what to call them and hate to be a white lady gesturing at a bag and mumbling: “those… yellow… things” with the adjective endings of “those” and “yellow” definitely not agreeing with “things.” [A version of David Sedaris’ amazing“tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds, I have started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive” from Me Talk Pretty One Day].
But then I learned that they are called bobby, and then I bought them, and then I loved them. Super-sized! A little greasy! SO crunchy! A nothing chip! A perfect chip! Also, so, so cheap? (Maybe too cheap, but that’s for another snaxie). “Why is no one talking about this?!”
[speaking of “no one is talking about BOBBY?!” one kid calls them “bobs” pronounced “bawbs” which I think is just extremely cute even if he isn’t really supposed to have them]
Bobby are a subset of the larger category of fryums. This umbrella category might contain puffed starchy fried snacks in the shape of wagon-wheels, or stars or the alphabet or waffled triangles or shorter, multi-color tubes. But I would say for the sake of nonce taxonomy that fryums are the thing you get BEFORE you fry um. Like they are a dehydrated molded carb-paste that you fry at home (or a guy fries in a giant kadhai on the street). Bobby, on the other hand, are ready to eat.
Which brings me to the theme of the day: something good and important and obvious to add to our encyclopedic survey of Pune’s snacks. SNACKS ARE READY TO EAT. Of course you might “fix” a snack (especially in the South, lol, where someone is always fixin’ up a little something) but too much fixin and it’s a charcuterie board or a girl dinner or whatever: it’s something else.
Snacks are GRAB. They are GO.
Partially, snacks are on my brain because I have young kids. I wanted to tell you about the time on the train that we forgot snacks, a critical mistake as the parents of toddlers, a true “what is this, your first rodeo?” moment, a failure realized too late, only once the screams had started. I rummaged through the five bags we were carrying (!), but it was for show. I knew. We had made the train; we had forgotten snacks. Aren’t Indian trains famous for their snacks? APPARENTLY NOT. Nothing could soothe my screaming, hungry children. A family behind us offered the kids a pack of pineapple bounce biscuits, which not only saved the day but ensured that even a year later, their favorite cookies are still Pineapple Bounce Biscuits. Gross! But understandable, because snacking is also like this.
Or: I fell asleep on a long flight, which is good, right? But then I missed the dinner service, and also missed breakfast! I was so hungry! And I started to panic, frankly. I was stuck in a middle seat next to a sleeping guy and I was genuinely actually hungry. And then opened my bag, and there was a bag of bobby I had bought at the highway rest stop. The corner was chewed off as if by a rat (me: I am the rat). The bag of bobby was occupying a huge part of my bag; I had dedicated a huge part of my backpack to them. I calculated the time at origin: very late at night. I calculated the time at destination: early morning. I ate the whole bag of bobby.
There is something compulsive about carrying snacks. This is the soft, dark underbelly of the snack: that we snack to feed ourselves a little but not fully, that we eat snacks to feel safe. Part of me doesn’t really want to get into it— that I started carrying a little cross-body bag at all times starting from age 12, that this, keeping snacks and water and a journal on my person, became a site for gentle ribbing at home. It doesn’t take a Freudian to draw lines between my career in food studies, my hobby writing about snacks, and an unstable childhood. [I paused a long time at unstable: the right word? I read this absolute belter of a Substack essay this week and while the author says up top that the life-writing has nothing to do with her usual nutrition content, I would say, um, it totally does. It absolutely does].
Recently someone on a listserv asked about people who pack food from their homes to eat while travelling and US people were giving such faltu examples, like hot sauce in my bag stuff, like “one time my friend brought a jar of peanut butter,” and I was like, ok, you have obviously never met a Gujarati lol. No offense Gujaratis! I love you! I have rarely laughed so hard as alongside a student who once described to me the experience of being on an extended-family vacation in Bali and eating theple on the side of the road while waiting for a bus to the beach.
If it’s not theple, it’s khakhra. If it’s not khakhra, it’s chiwda in a ziplock bag with a little spoon inside. If it’s not chiwda in a ziplock bag with a spoon inside, it’s an extra sleeve of bounce biscuits.
India is a good place for people like me— or maybe a better way to say it is that being in a place so marked by migration and famine and intense culinary regionalism makes me feel much less alone in my fixation with snacking. We are all planning our next meal, even us safe and food-secure ones. Even, if I am being really honest, us extravagantly rich ones. An Italian on Instagram said they plan dinner as soon as their eyes open each morning. Yes and. Here, we are all planning with a raw, electric edge of worry. We are carrying food with us, just in case.
Soooo many stories about Gujaratis and snacks. Sooooo many!
Here’s one: as we packed to leave Pune each kaki came with things for us to take. Each one has a little plastic carry bag of khakra and another of something salty: chivda—poha, mumra, cornflakes, chakra chivada (a whole convo on khakra chivada some day)—, chakli, tiki wada, bajri wada, (store bought Bakar wadi for S.), gathiya, sev, otters? Also breads: dasmi—sweet and spicy versions, thepla, did I say khakra? Did I mention that we get regular roomsli khakra plus rotli khakra plus bajri khakra if we are lucky and rarely heavenly dasmi khakra? But we’ll need sweets! Kaju katli from store, kopra pak, gujjia if we’re lucky, gulab jamin for our kiddo, Bombay halva cause it lasts, chikki cause Pune, Bundi lado, rava laddu, that Marwari sweet gewar Fred loved for him, and of course Parle G biscuit ten pack! And we’ll need dry fruits: kaju for sure but badam too. Anyway. After most kakis had dropped off snacks for us to eat on the road we needed to buy an additional suitcase so S went to get it. We finally get out the door with a suitcase and a half of snacks for the road and into my hand always very fresh spicy dasmi to eat in the car on the way to the airport and the sweets from people in Bombay and sometimes Kamshet and we get on the plane. Of course we are offering dasmi to everyone in our row on the plane but everyone has their own! We get to Newark and we get thru immigration and customs and we meet the final Boss: the food and agriculture officer. Because it’s Newark and it’s India flights time—I can only assume—the food and ag officer is Mehta. Mehta says to us: do you have any food in your luggage? S and I literally collapse into hysterical laughter and he takes a look at me (covered in henna and amulets etc) and I say : we have a suitcase of nashta. He laughs and waves us thru.
Bobby's to the rescue! I love thinking about how snacks (aka, snax) = security.