ABSTRACT

I started to write about my relationship to popcorn. Plain popcorn is my staple. But is it a food or a plastic bit of popular culture? In addition to the movie theater popcorn in waxed paper buckets, stale cheese popcorn in the local A&P, and strings of popcorn on the Christmas tree, there is that ideal diet food, air-popped popcorn, only twenty-five calories a cup. Real popcorn, a blue porcelain bowl filled with hot popcorn which is covered with salt and at least half a stick of melted butter and eaten before the Bette Davis movie even begins, is a constant craving. In my persistent desire to disappear, I eschew even diet margarine and eat air-popped popcorn plain, carefully measuring out four cups.