The One Cheddar Popcorn We Prefer To Leave On The Shelf

We all know how great popcorn tastes with salt and butter, and plain popcorn is one of the best low-calorie snacks there is. But what about those times when you want your popcorn to bite back just a little? What if you want something with a bit of tang, a hint of sharpness? That's where cheddar popcorn comes in, and when the time is right, it hits like no other snack in the world. (Not even Pirate's Booty or any other kind of cheddar puff snack lands the same.) But that's not to say every option is equally good. We here at The Takeout ranked six different brands of cheddar popcorn, and there was an obvious loser: SkinnyPop popcorn.

Now, you may call us old-fashioned, but if we're getting a bag of cheddar popcorn, one thing we expect to find is cheddar flavor. It seems as though SkinnyPop sees things a little differently, as our taste tester noted. "The popcorn taste was there, but the cheese was nonexistent," she wrote. The flavor was so lacking, in fact, that our tester feared that she got the wrong bag: "I even double-checked to make sure I bought the right bag, thinking I'd gotten plain by mistake." If the first thing someone thinks when they try your snack is "wait, that can't be right," it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

Some of you may argue that we're being a little unfair on SkinnyPop. It is, after all, trying to be a more healthy option for snackers. Surely that's not such a bad thing, even if it does come up a bit short in the flavor department. Our taster did acknowledge that SkinnyPop has less calories than the other options she tasted (43 calories per cup, as per the packaging). But, as she added, "I don't really care — because it also had the least amount of flavor." There's no excuse for that.

And besides, is SkinnyPop really that harmless? Diet culture can be an insidious thing, after all, and even the brand's name casts judgment, casting thinness as the ideal. If this is SkinnyPop, then all those other brands must be non-skinny popcorn — and you want to be skinny, don't you? But where does diet culture get us, at the end of the day? A whole lot of people resenting themselves and the food they put in their body, that's where. It tries to take away "unhealthy foods" with carbohydrates, among other types, and it makes us eat a brand of chips that causes uncontrollable diarrhea. Give us SmartFood and G.H. Cretor's any day of the week.