Snack Club: A Tingly Feeling (with Jonny Sun)
A few weeks ago, I got COVID. My wife Lindsey had it, too. We had to cancel plans with our friends Elissa and Jonny Sun, who kindly asked if they could bring us anything. I told them we had everything we needed, and thanked them. But about an hour later, I realized that while we had everything we needed, I didn’t have everything I wanted. I had a pang of desire for some kind of delicious snack.
I texted them once again, and asked if I could Venmo them a snack budget and have them be my “snack ambassadors,” and get whatever their favorite snacks are. Snacks, omakase. Elissa texted back, “We’ve never taken a request so seriously in our lives,” and a short while later, Jonny arrived with two brown paper grocery bags, full of treats, and left them at our door.
If one good thing came out of having COVID, it was this experience. Getting a tour of someone else’s tastes, getting to know them through the snacks they love – it was a delicious act of kindness and friendship, and I was the beneficiary.
Jonny Sun, if you don’t already know, is a wonderful writer and illustrator. He’s the NYT best-selling author of Goodbye, again, and everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too, and the illustrator of Gmorning, Gnight! by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He also has a delightful newsletter, which you can subscribe to at jonnysun.bulletin.com.
I asked him, as a fellow snack aficionado, what he might recommend for Snack Club, and he suggested Huang Fei Hong Spicy Peanuts. I was on board immediately. I just recently became smitten with these peanuts myself. A few months ago, after the first Snack Club email went out, my friend Margaret Miller introduced them to me (for future consideration) by sending two bags in the mail.
Huang Fei Hong Spicy Peanuts are a very popular snack in China. They’re seasoned with chilli peppers and with Sichuan pepper, which is best known for its mouth-numbing effect. If you aren’t familiar with Sichuan pepper, and you aren’t expecting it, it can be a little disconcerting! But it’s pretty exciting. An article on the Michelin Guide website explains, “the active chemical in Sichuan peppercorn excites tactile sensors in our lips and mouths—in other words, you feel the taste of the peppers as though your lips are being physically touched by something vibrating quickly, causing that numbness associated with eating Sichuan peppercorn.” [emphasis my own, but come on, can you blame me?]
Jonny described the peanuts like this: “They are tingly (in the sichuan pepper kind of way) and spicy and peanuty, but not dry-peanuty (which is my number one problem with most peanuts).”
He remembers eating these peanuts as a snack growing up, but he fell in love them as an adult just a few years ago. One of the joys of his relationship with Elissa, early on, was introducing her to foods from his childhood. One day, in an Asian grocery store in Calgary, the two of them chanced upon the spicy peanuts. “Oh! Have you ever had these?” he asked her. “I loved these as a kid.” Elissa tried them, and she loved them, too, and now they’re a regular part of their snack rotation.
Expressing love through food is an old, old idea. It’s certainly how my mom showed her affection, and many other home cooks before her. Historically, I have associated that idea of food = love entirely with home cooking. Not with store-bought snacks. But as I listened to Jonny tell this story about him and his wife, and after getting those grocery bags they filled for me, my thoughts about this kind of exchange started to evolve. I started to have a different kind of tingly feeling altogether.
When I sent out that newsletter about Snack Club in January, I wrote about curiosity, and the desire to try new things. (“Something different.” — my dad) I think, in a social vacuum, that’s exactly what gets fulfilled: curiosity. Plus, you hopefully get a bit of delight from eating something new and delicious.
As soon as you bring other people in, though, the stakes change. Introducing someone to your favorite snack is a way of saying, this is a little piece of who I am. I want to share it with you. It’s a part of my story, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Despite the plastic packaging and mass-manufactured foodstuffs, there’s the potential for something personal and revealing in giving your favorite snack to someone else.
So, a proposal: find a friend, and get them to be your snack ambassador. Agree on an amount to spend, tell them your dietary restrictions, and then, let them go for it – pick their very favorite snacks for you to try. In return, do the same for them. And then meet up with your bags of treats, exchange them, talk about each item, and then eat, full of tingly feelings from knowing a little more about the other.
Okay, so: if you want something special to put your snacks in, I’m very excited to introduce the new, official, Snack Club jumbo tote bag. It’s high-quality, heavy-duty, and big enough to hold the contents of a Snack Ambassador’s haul. Plus, it has the Snack Club logo and motto, and everyone in the chips aisle will see it and whisper to each other, “What is Snack Club? And how do I join?”
If that’s not enough merch for you, I also brought back the Accept Cookies hoodie (and t-shirt) along with the totes. If you weren’t a subscriber when the newsletter first launched, you might not have seen them before, because they were only available for a couple weeks. But you can order both the tote bags and the sweatshirts between now and July 7.
Happy snacking and sharing.
— Hrishikesh
ps: here's what else I'm up to.
a photo of I took of Jonny Sun outside my house