If you want to read about some of the fancy food available in startup cafeterias in Silicon Valley, that is a thing you can do. (Falafel waffles, fois gras, kobe beef, Google’s “world renowned” offerings, you know the usuallllllllll.) I’m sitting next to an open package of Jello Pudding Snacks  that I got from the 99 cents store so I’m not really feeling that jealous, but maybe you are? Love the life you’ve got.

French kids don’t snack. I knew this from watching the families around us in the village. Their children ate four square meals per day, on a set schedule: breakfast in the morning, lunch at around 12:30, the goûter at around 4:30 p.m., and dinner between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. That was it. Virginie confirmed my impressions. She even sent me France’s official food guide, which emphatically recommends no snacking. It doesn’t seem as if this advice is really necessary, anyway. For most French parents and children, this eating schedule is an ingrained, unquestioned habit. And it’s not that they are constantly struggling to avoid a secret raid on the pantry. Rather, eating at other times of the day simply would rarely occur to them. Just in case anyone strays, snack food ads on French TV carry a large white banner (like the warnings on cigarette packages) bluntly stating: “For your health, avoid snacking in between meals.”

If there’s one thing French children don’t have to worry about, it’s becoming Middle Class Snack Kids—the sort of people who spend a large portion of their incomes to fill their pantries full of snacks so they can grab something to munch on while watching TV or reading magazines, or the other many mindless things we do in the privacy of our own home. I had read about the amazing willpower French children appear to possess back in February when The Wall Street Journal published an essay called “Why French Parents Are Superior,” which explained that French children behave much better than American children in restaurants because they have been trained to wait to eat only at specific times of the day. American kids have no patience, because when they start throwing a tantrum, we give them something to snack on to keep them occupied. “Quit your squabbling, and eat this fruit roll-up!” we yell. “Here’s $5. Get yourself some candy from the corner store, and stay out of our hair for a little bit.”

Photo: SurlyGirl/Flickr

Give me Golden Rounds or give me Crisp'itz

Money and I have a fairly frigid relationship. I earn it, I save it, I use it to pay my bills — but outside of the methodical motions of routine monetary exchange, I have no idea what to do with it. I see my yuppie compatriots planning out their paychecks around Frye boots and ski trips to Utah and iPhone 4S upgrades, while I hold my money in a death grasp with a look of paralyzed consternation on my face. This is the tragic plight of a middle-class urbanite who was born and bred by cheapskate, suburban parents.

It wasn’t until college that I started to realize other people weren’t like me. I remember the moment with perfect clarity. I edited a literary magazine and was not-dating a guy who was in charge of the uber-hipster alternative weekly. This led to lots of not-really-intellectual conversations and, of course, late-night runs from the publications office to the 24-hour grocery store to procure snacks.

It was on one of these excursions to the cracker aisle that the aforementioned hipster boy reached out and grabbed a box of Ritz crackers to put in our basket. That’s right: Ritz crackers. Not “Zips” or “Crisp’itz” or “Golden Rounds,” but the real-deal, name-brand, most-expensive red box of Nabisco Ritz crackers. I was dumbfounded. Who buys name brand crackers? Heck, who buys name brand anything? I made him put them back. 

It took me days to get over the initial shock of what had happened and fully explore the question of whether I really wanted to not-be with someone who was willing to throw their parents’ money away on top-shelf snack foods. At the end of my self-involved meditation, I decided that I owed it to myself to be the liberal and open-minded humanist I knew I was. I at least needed to offer my fellow man the opportunity to tell his side of the story. And so I asked him: Why would you buy name-brand crackers? And he answered: They taste better.

I was not prepared for this answer. First, it seemed to make no logical sense at all to my deeply infected spendthrift brain: All “Ritz” crackers look the same, companies must go through great pains to make them taste the same, and honestly, the crackers aren’t that great to begin with. Who cares what it’s called—when it comes down to it, you’re still eating a Ritz cracker no matter what company owns the cracker-making machine. Second, I wasn’t really sure I’d ever had a real Ritz cracker before, and if so, it was over at a friend’s house where everything tasted better and was more exciting just by virtue of being away from my parents. I realized that I had no objective, or really even subjective, way to tell whether his claim was accurate.

And third (always leave the most embarrassing, yet most truthful reason for last), there is a crazy-person chip in my head that talks to me in the voice of my mother whenever I look at name-brand products and says things like: “Sure they taste better, but do they really taste 50 cents better? I don’t think so! Besides, the Food Lion brand crackers are on sale!” and “We are not buying clothes from the Limited Too. You’re just going to outgrow them, and the JCPenney outlet has perfectly nice jeans for $9.99. We’ll buy them a size up!”

I listened carefully to both his fairly straightforward explanation and the voices in my head, and I concluded that the only way forward was to justify my illogical anxiety about spending money with self-righteous, yet confident-sounding indignation. In other words, I told him that not everyone grows up with a father who is a lawyer, and that if he didn’t have such a bourgeois upbringing, he would know that there are vastly better things he could be doing with their money than buying name-brand crackers.

I realize now that this type of thinking is probably a genetic disease passed on to me through my parents’ DNA. I’d like to say that it’s the kind of thing people like me grow out of after college or once they start making more than $35K a year. But who am I kidding? It’s probably terminal.

The only time I buy name-brand food is when I go to the grocery store on Sunday night right after the hoards have left and the spot where all the cheap yogurt should be is completely empty. The next step up is Dannon—by 40 cents. And even that requires a pep talk where I tell myself it’s OK, because when I space the $2.99 quart of plain yogurt over four days, it’s only 75 cents per day for breakfast, which is not very much, and that’s only 10 cents a day more than if I was getting the grocery store brand, and 10 cents won’t even get you five minutes of parking time on a meter downtown. So there. This may seem like therapy-worthy behavior for someone with savings in their bank account and no credit card debt, but I like to think of my psychosis as an asset.

Now, I know there are others out there who suffer from the same, illogical cheapness that I do. Perhaps I have made being a spendthrift seem too bleak, and holding the mirror up to our shared disorder has only served to heighten your already elevated anxiety about life. To you, I say that  there is hope. I, myself, have made some impressive strides in trying to reverse my behavior just over the past few years. For example, when there was no cheap yogurt, I used to instead get cheap milk and make my own cheap yogurt. But then I realized that’s just plain crazy.

Right?

Annie Schutte is a school librarian in Washington, DC

“Middle Class Snack Kid” is a term I made up for people who do not spend a lot on themselves on the whole, but are running themselves into the ground buying food and drink. I coined this term for myself because I needed to diagnose my disease — the disease being that no matter how much money I make and how little it feels like I spend on myself, I am always living paycheck to paycheck. How can I be so damn broke all the time? Me! The person who doesn’t own a single piece of furniture that wasn’t given to her for free! The person who will wear one pair of jeans until they literally fall apart! The person who will wait until she looks like a crazy mountain woman before she will shell out $40 for a haircut!

Then it hit me: snacks. Fuck. I am all about snacking. As a friend once put it, I am D.T.H. — Down to Hang. And for me, hanging means snacking. I will watch entire seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in one sitting, as long as my friends and my snacks are there. My version of the shameful closet full of shoes would be a closet full of Kettle Chips and cherry tomatoes. And this connection between hanging out with friends and snacking started early. 

For the Middle Class Snack Kid, Goldfish crackers ran like water, and friends came over after school for nachos and for lying to people about our age in AOL chat rooms. We lived like this because we had two parents, each of whom had a job. They were probably not married, but we had them. Some of us even had a live-in grandma who had a savings, a pension, and a social security check, and was generous with her $20 bills (cough, cough Me cough, cough).

Middle Class Snack Kids were raised without some of the finer things, but with a mindset that life was taken care of in all the important ways. We may not have had that new Walkman, but damnit if there weren’t cookies made by Grandma every day. And so I may know enough not to go buying a TV or new clothes, but damnit if I don’t buy myself all the snacks I desire, with no thought given to the fact that I do not have the three incomes of my mom, my dad and my grandma. I have one income. I have the one income of a me, with an entry level-type job and student loans.

What it comes down to is this: I am not middle class anymore. I was raised middle class, but I did not graduate into that stratum. What I graduated into was a world where I have a drama degree in a recession, and that translates firmly into the lower class. And I have to deal with that. I buy myself snacks and drinks and dinners in restaurants because it is a way of pretending that everything is okay. I know I should be saving this money, but the deprivation in all the other ways (the shitty furniture; the pairs of underwear that could be in kindergarten by now; the TV with the broken volume button that turns the volume up instead of down) freaks me out and makes me sad. So I think, “Well, I know I can’t buy a new TV, but I’m allowed to spend money on food! It’s food! Food is a necessity!” It’s a case of not seeing the money forest for the food trees.

My grandma and granddad got our family into the middle class by budgeting their money. Paychecks were separated out into envelopes for food, mortgage, gas, and fucking nothing else. These people paid for cars in cash, and here I am snacking my way out of the middle class because I feel like getting a latte at Starbucks twice a week? Because there’s a Pinkberry close to work? Because I want to eat an entire bag of chips by myself while I re-watch Deadwood? Ugh. This Middle Class Snack Kid business is nonsense.

However, simply realizing this and holding yourself accountable can be the key to putting an end to it. Steven R. Covey says in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (which yes, I have read and don’t be an asshole about it), “There is a gap between stimulus and response.” This has been the most important piece of self-help advice I have ever received. Why is this a relevant to the Middle Class Snack Kid? Because if you take the time to ask yourself why you’re putting that bag of chips in your grocery cart or buying that fried pickle appetizer at the bar, it can make all the difference. How do I know this? Because when I look at my spending history in months where I wasn’t paying attention, I’ve historically spent about $360 a month on food and drinks. That is the most embarrassing thing. That is so terrible. Admitting that in a public forum is excruciating.

However, in months where I had the discipline to pay attention, I spend more like $230. I am not kidding. That is a difference of $130 dollars (math!). If my grandma were here right now, she would be so ashamed of me for the months where I lose my head. She would throw like five envelopes in my formerly middle class face and she would be like, “Hey! I bought you snacks because I could. But you cannot, so cut it out, dum dum. Also, you’re getting chubby and I’m allowed to say that because I’m dead.” It’s also important to realize that it can be a month-to-month problem, marked by the influx of your paycheck. Forgive yourself for the stretches of time when you lose it and end up buying $15 worth of grapes, celery, cucumbers, and carrots (one of my healthier snack binges), but know that keeping it in control one week makes it easier the next.

So that’s my advice, fellow Snack Kids: the next time you’re at the grocery store and you’re holding something in your hands, take a second to ask yourself why you’re buying it. Are you buying it because it’s a viable meal ingredient? Or are you buying it because you miss being 14 years old and hanging out with your best friend while you obsess over reruns of The Simpsons? The difference between those two things is the difference that could change everything. Just ask me, the 29-year-old woman who recently got a haircut, a new pair of jeans, and has a three-month-old savings account with actual money in it. Though that same woman also ate a protein bar, 3 pickles, and a package of cherry tomatoes for dinner last night, which is weird and gross. Change is a process, you guys.

Lindsay Katai is a writer/performer/debtor living in Los Angeles, CA. She sometimes remembers to use Twitter.