Why do we eat popcorn at the movies?
We love slouching in our seats at the movie theater with a big tub of popcorn, but did you know that this snack has been eaten for centuries? We wondered how popcorn found its way to the movie theater.
Popcorn is our go-to movie-theater snack, but this treat had a long journey before it ended up at the movies. I looked into how it got there for you.
Where does popcorn come from?
Popcorn really is an oldie but goodie, because a form of popcorn was already being eaten 6,700 years ago. Archaeologists have found remains of corn and hard popcorn kernels in Peruvian tombs.
Americans like to believe that popcorn was part of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621, and that popcorn was therefore introduced in the States back then. ‘But there are no written records of this, and besides, the wrong type of corn grew in that region,’ writes American food historian Stephanie Butler.
‘It was the French occupiers who first wrote, around 1800, about a Native American tribe, the Iroquois, that made popcorn. The French copied the trick, and after that popcorn’s popularity began to grow in the United States, where the snack was mainly found around circuses and markets.’
Mass consumption of popcorn only really began when Charles Cretors invented the first popcorn-popping machine in 1890.
How did popcorn become such a popular snack?
‘The machine Charles Cretors had invented was mobile and could therefore be used to sell popcorn on the street, which several people then started doing. It was a tasty, but also inexpensive snack. During the Great Depression, it was one of the few snacks people could still afford, so its popularity rose enormously,’ Stephanie Butler tells me.
All well and good, but how did this become our go-to snack at the movie theater? Because whether you’re team sweet or team salty, a big tub of popcorn is a must. ‘At first, movie theaters wanted nothing to do with the cheap and crackling snack because they wanted to attract a sophisticated audience. Even later, when sound was added to films and theaters opened their doors to a larger audience, they still weren’t enthusiastic about popcorn.’
It was only during the Great Depression, when popcorn became hugely popular, that street vendors seized the opportunity to sell bags of popcorn to moviegoers before the film began. People could afford it and started bringing popcorn inside. Stephanie explains: ‘When movie theaters realized how much profit could be made from this, they wanted to reap the benefits. Because the movie theaters had not yet been designed for popcorn machines, they rented out space inside or just outside the movie theater to street vendors, who were more than happy to go along with it.’ Eventually, movie theaters installed popcorn machines themselves, and the rest is history.
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