Always wanted to know: why do you eat popcorn in the cinema

It's not really a big one among life's questions, but I still want to know. In the cinema, I always run towards the middle salty, but why do we actually eat that popped corn at a movie? Our experts at FavorFlav, of course, have the answer to that.

Popcorn is our go-to cinema snack, but this treat has come a long way before it ended up in the cinema. I looked into how that journey went for you.

Where does popcorn come from?

That popcorn is quite a classic, because a form of popcorn was already eaten 6700 years ago. Remains of corn and hard kernels of popcorn have been found by archaeologists in Peruvian tombs.

Americans like to believe that popcorn was part of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621 and that popcorn was therefore already introduced in the States at that time. ‘But there are no writings about that, and moreover, the wrong type of corn was grown in that region,’ writes American food historian Stephanie Butler.

‘It was the French occupiers who first wrote about an Indian tribe, the Iroquois, that made popcorn around 1800. The French watched and learned the trick, and then the popularity of popcorn began to grow in the United States, where the snack was mainly found around circuses and markets.’

The mass consumption of popcorn really began when Charles Cretors invented the first popcorn popping machine in 1890.

How did popcorn become such a popular snack?

‘The machine that Charles Cretors invented was mobile and could therefore be used to sell popcorn on the street, which several people started doing. It was a tasty, but also a cheap snack. During the Great Depression, it was one of the few snacks that people could still afford, which greatly increased its popularity,’ Stephanie Butler tells me.

All well and good, but how did this become our go-to snack in the cinema? Because whether you're team sweet or team salty, a large bucket of popcorn cannot be missed. ‘Initially, movie theaters wanted nothing to do with the cheap and crunchy snack because they wanted to attract a sophisticated audience. Even later, when sound was added to films and theaters opened up to a larger audience, they were still not enthusiastic about popcorn.’

It was only during the Great Depression, when popcorn became extremely popular, that street vendors seized this opportunity to sell bags of popcorn to moviegoers before the film started. People could afford this and began bringing popcorn inside. Stephanie explains: ‘When cinemas realized how much profit could be made from this, they wanted to reap the benefits. Since the cinemas were not yet built with popcorn machines, they rented out space in the cinema or just outside the cinema to the street vendors, and they were more than happy to go along with this.’ Eventually, cinemas started installing popcorn machines themselves, and the rest is history.

Text: Favorflav