On Linguistics: What is a snack?

In the chat thread of a Twitch stream I watched recently, someone named Project_Hope asked "is Chinese food a snack if I don't move from in front of the fridge while eating it?" The streamer, Kate Stark, had just gone on break, and encouraged her viewers to take a break at the same time, to stretch, have a snack, etc.

My perhaps ill-advised response was along the lines of "I have an MA into linguistics. I can turn that question into a half-hour lecture." To my surprise, Project_Hope wanted to hear what went into that lecture.

Half an hour might be exaggerating, but the question illustrates the difficulty of drawing boundaries between semantic categories. Chinese food is generally thought of as a meal category; what changes do we have to make to make it a snack?

If I were teaching undergrads, I'd pause here to ask the class what they thought the difference was, and write the first few answers on the board to keep track. I'd expect those answers to look like the following:

• A meal is bigger than a snack
• A meal happens at a set time of day, while snacks can be eaten at any time
• A meal has various types of food, while snacks can be just one food (honestly, this is starting to sound like the Four Questions)
• A meal should be nutritionally balanced, or at least healthy, while snacks are usually junk food
• Various foods that fit into one category but not the other:
• meat, vegetables, pasta, rice, and potatoes are all associated with meals
• chocolate, popcorn, trail mix, and chips are associated with snacks

Then I'd ask some leading questions to play with their expectations. Things like:

• Sometimes at 3PM I suddenly decide I'm hungry for carrots. Carrots are a healthy vegetable. Does that mean I'm eating a meal?
• What about the day I was really tired and late for work and had granola bars for breakfast? Is that a snack?
• What if I'm really hungry before bed and have popcorn *and* chocolate *and* applesauce? Is that a meal?
• Or if I'm used to eating dinner at 5pm, but am meeting a friend for dinner at 7? If I eat something small at 5 to tide me over, is that a snack or an extra dinner?

The point here is that none of these criteria by themselves are sufficient to define an act of eating something as either meal or snack, and there's no real consensus on what combination of meal attributes and snack attributes define something as one or the other--which ones are the criterial attributes.

Here I might digress into a non-food example to reinforce the idea of criterial attributes. 

• Is a chair still a chair without a seat? Without a back? Without legs?
• Is a bird still a bird if it can't fly? If it doesn't make a nest? If it doesn't have feathers?
• Is a professor still a professor without a Ph.D? (Here I pause and hope somebody laughs.)

Questions like these, and the difficulty we have in answering them, form the basis of semantic Prototype Theory. In Prototype theory, categories of thing, like "meal," "snack," "bird," and "chair" are defined by attributes. Attributes of "meal" include "relatively large amount of food," "variety of food," "set time of day," "includes protein and vegetables." Attributes of snack include "small amount of food," "only one type of food," "can be eaten at any time," and "junk food." The meals that have all the meal attributes, and the snacks that have all the snack attributes, are prototypes of their respective categories. 

There are also events that are more like meals, and events that are more like snacks, and events that have about an equal mix of meal and snack attributes and could be either. Returning to the nonfood examples, the prototype of "bird" in your head might be a robin or an eagle, but it's unlikely to be a penguin, ostrich, or Archaeopteryx. Those are peripheral members of the "bird" category, and Archaeopteryx is so peripheral it's hard to tell whether it's actually a bird or a reptile.

Now we can start to answer the original question. Project_Hope ate Chinese food during the break in the stream. Chinese food is made of meal-like ingredients like meat, tofu, vegetables, and noodles. But they ate in snack-like circumstances: at an odd time, standing in front of the refrigerator they had taken the food from, where the norm for meals in North American society is to eat sitting at a table.

Project_Hope's situation is a borderline case: it's enough like both a meal and a snack to be either. But as far as I'm concerned, the circumstances of the eating event outweigh the food content. It's a weird snack, but yes, it's a snack.