Suggest me a Snack

What this tool does

It is the middle of the afternoon, or late in the evening, and you want a snack. Not a meal, just something to nibble. The trouble is you open the cupboard, look at everything, and somehow want none of it. This tool settles it. It hands you a snack at random from a hand-picked list, so you can stop grazing the shelves with your eyes and actually eat something.

Press the button for a snack. Press it again for another. Ask for a few at once if you would rather choose from a short list than be handed one thing.

How to use it

1. Number / Quantity. How many snacks to pull at once, from 1 to 100.
2. Generate. Pulls a fresh snack, or a fresh set if you asked for several.
3. Starts with, Contains, Ends with. Optional filters that trim the list before it picks. Leave them blank to draw from everything.
4. Copy. Copies the current snack, or your shortlist, to the clipboard as plain text.

A snack is already on screen when the page loads, so there is nothing to set up first.

How it works

The snack list is fixed, and every press draws from it at random. Ask for more than one and you get that many different snacks, never the same one twice in a set.

The filters let you aim. Contains keeps any snack with your text in it, so typing cheese brings up Cheese and crackers and Cheese puffs, while typing sweet or a craving word swings it that way. Starts with keys off the first letter, ends with off the last.

What is on the list

It is a shelf of about a hundred snacks, sweet and savoury both. The lighter end has things like Popcorn, Pretzels, Trail mix, and Veggie sticks with dip, while the heartier end runs to Nachos, Buffalo wings, and Jalapeno poppers, with plenty of cookies, fruit, and chips in between.

Because sweet and savoury sit side by side, a random pull can swing either way, which helps on the days when you cannot tell what you are in the mood for. Take it as a shelf of ideas, and lean on the Contains box when you do know roughly what you want.

Why you stand at the cupboard and pick nothing

The open-cupboard stall is a small version of a well-studied effect. When we face a lot of options at once, we tend to choose slowly, or freeze and choose nothing. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper showed it plainly in a 2000 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where shoppers offered two dozen jams to taste were far less likely to buy one than shoppers offered only six. A full snack cupboard does the same thing on a smaller scale.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz called the wider pattern the paradox of choice, that more options often leave us less satisfied, not more, because we keep wondering about the ones we passed up. A random pick steps around both. It hands you one snack to say yes to, and a snack you actually eat beats ten you keep deliberating over while the craving fades.

Narrowing it to what you feel like

If the first pull is not quite it, a couple of quick questions help. Are you after sweet or savoury, since that one call halves the field. Then how hungry are you, because a handful of Popcorn and a plate of Buffalo wings solve very different sizes of craving. And what do you actually have, which the Contains box answers in a second if you type an ingredient you know is in the house. Past that, do not overthink it. A snack is the lowest-stakes food decision there is, so take the pick and enjoy it.

Questions people ask

Is it free, and does it save anything?

Free, no sign-up, and nothing you do here is saved. It all runs in your browser, so copy a snack if you want to remember it.

Can I get a few at once?

Yes. Set the quantity to the number you want, up to 100, and press Generate for that many different snacks in one pull.

Is it sweet snacks or savoury?

Both. The list mixes the two together, so type sweet or savoury into the Contains box if you want to lean one way, or leave it blank for either.

Are there lighter options too?

Yes, alongside the indulgent ones. Things like fruit, veggie sticks, nuts, and rice cakes are in the mix, though this is a suggestion tool rather than a nutrition tracker, so it does not count or rank anything.

References

1. Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, "When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, the study behind choice overload. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11138768/
2. Barry Schwartz, "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less", his talk on how more options can lower satisfaction. https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choice