17. Malkist cheese cracker biscuits

Cheese Nabs, the Big Goldfish, and other cheez-snax

Cheese biscuits re-entered my life as a playground snack. Having kids is a great snack-discovery-mechanism, because all of a sudden your whole social milieu is moms packing snacks. And sometimes they’re handing out some random snack which is the only one their kid will eat but that you would never have reached for— this was the case with these cheese sandwich crackers. At first, I declined. Then the mom explained that actually I should PLEASE eat one because if all the grown-ups ate one, there would be only ONE left over for her kid to have a second biscuit, but he was NOT allowed to have three. Eight biscuits per pack: behind her hospitality was a whole algorithm. She is, co-incidentally, a quantitative scientist, but something that astonishes me is that all hands-on parents become like this. Being a mom is so much mental math.

I liked— maybe loved!?— this cheese biscuit. I wanted two biscuits! Instead of stealing her kid’s second biscuit, I wiped crumbs from my chin and laughed: “wow, I haven’t had a cheese biscuit since I was in grade school!” “Huh,” she mused. “These are all he will eat.”

But even this wasn’t the full truth, because in grade school, I mostly avoided these cheese cracker sandwiches. We didn’t call them biscuits, of course, this being Indian English: we called them Nabs. At my school, they came with “snack,” which well-behaved kids were allowed to fetch for the class from the loading dock behind the cafeteria: flat crates stacked with half-frozen milk and a weekly rotation of biscuits. I loved Lorna Doones with their baroque swirl stamp and fake vanilla flavour; I was intrigued by Fig Newtons’ density, unexpected heft, those small popping seeds, the seam of the biscuit around the filling. Cheese nabs: pass. Literally pass. I simply gave them away.

Some kids in the class were cheese nab fanatics, though, so I am not surprised to look up Cheese Nabs and find high-brow paeans to my least favorite snack cracker in the likes of Food & Wine and Gravy. Especially because, it turns out, Nabs were a North Carolina thing, produced by Lance Crackers out of Charlotte— technically, both the peanut butter and cheddar cheese sandwich crackers are called “ToastChee.” Of course North Carolinian food writers are nostalgic for the crackers of their youth! Southerners would be nostalgic for a paper bag.*

These Malkist cheese sandwich biscuits are different than Cheese Nabs, though. They are much bigger, the size of your palm. The fact that they are not individually-portioned takes them out of the lunchbox economy: true, indeed, of almost all Indian snacks. And while Lance is the kind of industrial snack producer that a home state can somehow rally around as “local” (thinking of Utz, here, also), Malkist biscuits are IMPORTED. They say so in smart white letters on the package. They are imported from Indonesia, and so participate in a more localized political economy in which “luxury snacks” are imported from Southeast Asia and the Gulf— something I’d like to learn more about.**

[By the way I just searched ‘lunchbox political economy’ just in case I am onto something, also ‘snacks political economy’ and all that came back was stuff about the obesity epidemic, so please all consider this a plea for more theoretically-engaged food writing, gawww, cowboy up food studies]

Anyway, the biggest difference is that Malkist biscuits are spackled across with a crust of sugar. Crunch goes the sugar layer, crunch go the 14 layers of cracker. Like the also-questionable Keebler biscuits that combine the cheese biscuit and the peanut butter filling, these are a sweet-salty thing. Physiologically, then, compulsively eatable. The next pack, I bought for a road trip and ate by myself the day after we got home. Crunch crunch crunch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jaya Saxena’s super-interesting article about how US fine dining is in its “LOL” era, how we all just want stupid food, “comfort food, but with a slightly trolling “lol wouldn’t it be funny” edge.” I am not on-the-US-beat enough to say about this trend, but also I am old enough to remember when people were saying the same thing about David Chang— heeheehoho this highbrow guy also likes Domino’s.

Like Saxena, I am inclined to think that there is something more to this highbrow-lowbrow stupid food thing. I mean, maybe it’s just that same David Chang “slummin’ it by eating prole food” vibe but I also think that the trolling of LOL food is more aggressive, more escapist, more reactionary than even Saxena lets on. Does selling Totino’s Pizza Rolls at a fine dining restaurant resist the current cynical, anti-intellectual death-cult of culture or is it another symptom?

Like: what actually IS the political economy of all this uncomfortable comfort food??? I’ve been thinking, for example, about the giant goldfish in that article: the giant goldfish is an appetizer at restaurant Time and Tide. It’s a big goldfish that apparently tastes like Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

I even thought— I could make that giant goldfish. Cheese crackers are delightful and easy to make. Rolling out one giant goldfish would save me the tedium of scoring and poking all those little perforations. While I never loved ToastChee, I loveeeee Cheez-its and Goldfish and Cheetos, omg, Cheetos! The king of cheese snacks! And even, later on, Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies and the kind-of-phallic Trader Joe’s cheese space shuttles: I love too.

But I also thought that the Big Goldfish actually isn’t that weird at all? It’s just a cheese cracker. They are— stay with me?— non-mimetic, they stand for themselves, like a yip of delight or howl of pain. Cheetos are just cheetos, you know?

I’m not sure its as simple as: my taste-buds were fried into aporeia by the Malkist biscuit’s intense sweetness and bland-cheesiness to the point where I had to keep eating them to figure out what I was tasting. It also wasn’t like: take Cheese Nab nostalgia and make it weirder. It’s not the knowing fuck-off gesture of making homemade spaghettios and then serving them out of a real spaghettio can, tableside. “It’s not that deep”: something the friends of my students say to them, which is a way to shut down analysis, which is a way to shut down dissent, which is a way to shut down—

Saxena ends the LOL food article with a note of resignation: we are in the age of the kid’s menu, enjoy the mozzarella sticks and jalapeno poppers while they last. Even my days of eating ultra-processed-food on the playground will come to an end I guess: the days are long but the years are short. Most of all, when I think about the cheez-snack-verse and our LOL food era and bad-comfort-food in general, I think of its ubiquity, its not-that-deep-ness: the whole thing like a thin, smothering blanket. The slogan said it first anyway: Malkist, Can’t Resist.

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PS. This is all zero-draft shit! Unedited writing! Kind of horrifying to send half-formed thoughts into the ether but please understand being loose here keeps the whole boat afloat: the whole boat, I guess, being my research-and-writing practice? IDK who cares but just a caveat.

*I am being rhetorical!!!!!!! <3

**Modern Bakery, which for the longest time I thought was a post-independence thing, like Wibs, is totally owned by the Mexican GRUPO BIMBO. These globalized flows that avoid major centers of capital in the US and Europe are so fascinating to me, if anyone has reading recs, send em.