Background:

In our modern world, many extremely appealing snacks can be purchased in giant quantities (Figure 1).

The purchaser is thereby enticed to, say, eat 5 pounds of sour gummy worms, or to have ”Flamin’ Hot Cheetos” for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The Issue:

Unfortunately, supposedly most snack foods have negative impacts on long-term health when consumed in massive quantities. But how can we resist eating them?

Proposal:

The answer is simple: just make it slightly less appealing to snack by adding some sort of disgusting object to the snack container!

Imagine how much less appealing a bag of chips would be if it had a bunch of weird rubber octopus tentacles coming out of it, or a jar of peanut butter with a bunch of fake spider legs emerging from it (Figure 2).

Conclusion:

These re-usable “revolting items” could be added by the snack-purchaser to any snack that they have trouble resisting. Now, someone who wants to eat, say, a giant Toblerone chocolate bar would have to first unwrap a bunch of disgusting giant rubber millipedes from it.

PROS: Should provide an additional boost to consumers’ snack-resisting willpower.

CONS: It might be possible to, in a frenzy of snacking, inadvertently consume some fake plastic centipedes while eating a bag of Hot Fries. This could pose a choking hazard as well as possibly exposing the user to more microplastics (actually “macroplastics” in this case). This idea also won’t work for foods that are ALREADY somewhat disgusting, like if you were going to eat a jar full of pickled eels or something.

Originally published 2026-01-12.