rustle rustle

[pebblerocker]

Do any of you know of any portable snacks that can be eaten quietly?

I've started my studies with a little 3-day preparatory course, and... doing brain stuff is very tiring? Physical work I can do all day, but sitting and listening and thinking is difficult to switch into. By morning tea time I was convinced we'd skipped our first break and gone straight through to lunch. Snacking more often might help, but I don't want to bother the others with rustly muesli bar wrappings or bags of nuts.

The woman next to me ate an apple today, amazingly quietly. I like apples, but for me to eat one half that quietly would consume all my attention.

Comments

[sallymn]

Banana?

[pebblerocker]

Of course! The non-crunchy fruit!

[sallymn]

And it comes in its own neat natural carry case :)

[capri0mni]

Resealable plastic bags (like these) don't rustle. I'd suggest taking a pint-sized one of those and filling it with pieces of dried fruit, sunflower seeds, and the like, and filling it up before you leave home. That way, you can also buy in bulk, which is cheaper, and produces less trash.

When I was in high school, a bag of this sort of trail mix was always in my lunchbox, and a half-pint bag would last about a week... Plus, dried apple slices don't crunch, and they don't make your hands sticky.

In high school, my gorp mix was: raisins, dried apples (sometimes dried apricots) sunflower seeds, cashews, almonds, and carob chips (<-- they make a lousy substitute for chocolate, but if you're not expecting chocolate, they're rather good)

[pebblerocker]

Aha. Trail mix is one of my favourites, good to take on almost any expedition. I usually carried mine in a plastic snack box for work, and it tended to rattle, especially if I included nuts. A zippy bag would be so much quieter for it!

I haven't had dried apples for ages! They're a fun texture, different from most other dried fruits.

[capri0mni]

I'm glad my suggestion was (potentially) helpful.

[vilakins]

Zippy bags are great for that! I used to take one to cinemas to put any bought sweets into as those cellophane bags are so bloody noisy.* (I don't buy sweets now.)

* Damned woman next to me in Peter Jackson's They Shall Never Grow Old annoyed the hell out of me with a bag of crisps.

[capri0mni]

Kinda makes you wonder why cinemas don't commission zippy-bagged wrapped snacks from their suppliers as a matter of course.

... unless they want people to hear others opening their snacks, and realize they want want a snack, too. After all, its the food and drink where movie theaters make most of their money. :-/

[vilakins]

Huh, something happened to my comment; can't see it anywhere. I can't be bothered reproducing it, but basically soft thin bread-bag-type plastic would work well.

It turned up in my email just fine!

[pebblerocker]

Vilakins said: Zippy bags would cost them, but ordinary thin soft plastic bags like supermarkets sell bread in would work so much better than the crackly ones.

Once you're in the cinema though, it's a bit late to want to buy something, so the noise just annoys everyone else.

Local jaffa trivia
Little cardboard packets of jaffas (see here used to be really popular here at films which was great; pity they're now in cellophane too. A real local icon, they're little balls, chocolate covered in a hard orange-flavoured coating: either crunch them or suck them till you get to the chocolate. They're such an icon, one is often served with coffee. Heh, I recently shot one right across the cafe by picking up my spoon, not realising they put one in the bowl. They make damned good projectiles, and some kids used to fire them at others in the cinema, and no one grew up here without at least once hearing a whole packet-load roll down the steps after someone accidentally dropped theirs. Jaffas and films went together in those days, I'm sure because of the little packets as well as the taste.

Re: It turned up in my email just fine!

[vilakins]

Thanks! Weird. At first I thought it was hidden in a collapsed thread somewhere, or I commented somewhere else in error.

[hunningham]

Yoghurt? Satsumas or any of the easy-peel oranges. Dried fruit won't crunch in the same way nuts do, so raisins, dates, dried apricots might work for you. Take museli bars out of their wrapping and wrap them in cling film. That's all I can think of.

[pebblerocker]

Repackaging muesli bars is a great idea, thank you! And I like fruits.