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Popcorn: The Only Grain That Performs

Last weekend, the village of North Loup, Nebraska, population somewhere around three hundred, threw its 125th Annual Popcorn Days. A carnival took over Highway 11 from Friday to Sunday. There was team penning and sorting, a turtle race, kids’ games, a juvenile parade, a men’s slow pitch tournament, sand volleyball, a street dance, and on Sunday the largest parade in the area to close the show. The theme this year was “Looking Back at 125 Years of Popcorn Days,” which is what happens when the anniversary becomes the headline: the parade turns into a mirror. II spent my childhood summers in North Loup with my grandfather, in a house where the television pulled in exactly one signal, channel 10/11, and where the calendar bent around one August weekend the way other towns bend around Christmas. The smell arrived before the event did. Hot oil, salt, the sweet dust hanging over the poppers. You could stand at the edge of town with your eyes closed and know what week it was.

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The Popcorn Cabal

I grew up in Nebraska and I was fed popcorn all my life as part of a generational touchstone. If you squeezed me a little too hard, peanut oil would come out of my eyes!

Now that I’m back in the popcorn swing after a decade away, I was surprised and disappointed to find food giant ConAgra has a stranglehold on free market popcorn buying choices.

ConAgra wrangles three popcorn brands in their bin: Act II and Jolly Time and Orville Redenbacher are all ConAgra products! Gosh, I wonder if the popcorn and ingredients are exactly the same in all three popcorn brands and it’s only the packaging that creates a difference: Buy one brand and you’ve tasted them all! That takes the fun out of popcorn exploration.