This won't come as any surprise to you I'm sure, but people are idiots. One day I experienced this first hand when I placed my laptop, which was inside a big backpack into the security machine at the airport. This was before the days of the trays. Out of the machine it came and on the back a big smear of mushed banana. Yes, the dork behind me had put his banana on the belt heading into the screening machine. Sigh.
There are times you need to bring a snack with you on the road, and these days, into the sky. Finding healthy snacks is really not that hard to manage. Many fruits and all dried fruit don't need refrigeration and neither do nuts. Other decent snack options, in my opinion, are Asian treats like rice crackers and wasabi peas.
Listening to Michael Pollan on Michael Pollan on National Public Radio recently I heard him talk about the price we are willing to pay for packaged, processed food. He pointed out these foods are expensive, unhealthy, and generally not good for the environment. Really, they barely qualify as food at all. Adding insult to injury, much of them don't really taste all that good. Oh I guess they do if you grew up eating them, but most processed snack foods, like those bright orange squiggles that are supposedly cheese flavored, taste pretty nasty to me.
My plan was to review a bunch of healthy, low-fat, snacks. But the ones I tasted were so crappy I couldn't see the point. The one packaged/processed snack that I really do like is called Sensible Foods, Crunch Dried Snacks. Most of the line is organic, GMO-free and includes no artificial flavors or colors. There are sweet fruit snacks including the Cherry Berry blend of apples, cherries, blueberries and strawberries and Orchard Blend which has apples, peaches and apricots, as well as a couple of savory versions too such as Roasted Soy Nuts and Organic Supersweet Corn which has a pinch of sea salt added. They taste really good are healthy and convenient and will never leave a big messy spot on anyone's backpack.
