A snack used as a noun is a small amount of food eaten in isolation such as a single serving bag of chips or an apple without being part of a larger meal. Used as a verb it refers to the act of eating a snack. In both cases this is distinct from a meal which is both a larger portion of food or foods eaten at it and the time set aside for the eating of said foods. Meals come in many forms both temporally (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and in scale (banquets, potlucks, box lunch) while snacks are implicitly of a single undifferentiated type: quick, simple, often eaten while doing something else. While any food can in principle be a snack the nature of the term implies that it is small, portable, does not come on a plate or bowl, and is not very filling. Snack foods are a class of products that exist to act as snacks; edible right out of their packaging, intended to be consumed completely in that instance, and typically eaten immediately after purchase. For obvious psychological reasons snack foods line the spaces of check outs and gas stations.
Snacking occupies a strange place in our social and cultural landscape. On one hand it can be an act of self indulgence from people trying to get a quick hit of dopamine by eating some empty calories with too much salt, sugar, and preservatives. On the other hand a snack can be a quick dose of much needed food ingested in haste when stopping for a meal is inconvenient or impossible. These descriptions are not mutually exclusive even if they contrast in tone. One thing that snacks are not is normal regardless of how common they are. Meals are normal, healthy, and the correct way to eat. This does not make snacking wrong but it does imply that it is the exception and persistent snacking is a sign something is off either in one's psychological relation to food or in one's time as a basic part of scheduling in the modern world assumes carve outs for meals.
IRON NODER XVIII: NEGLIGENCE IS THE RUST OF THE SOUL