Can Eating Be Play?
Playing with your food vs. getting played by your food.
Posted May 6, 2026 | Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
If you have observed younger children squishing Play-Doh, you likely also have noticed them tasting it. Reassuring text on those yellow cans carefully notes that the material is “non-toxic.” That's a good thing, because when mushed to a tempting multicolor, the play medium becomes the object of desire. And in the mouth it goes.
But usually not more than once or twice because, well, let me ask, have you ever tasted Play-Doh? The inviting medium does not match the message.
Playing With Your Food
Inventive older children might chew their toast into a map of Texas, or mound mashed potatoes into a volcano, or, if reluctantly eyeballing the vegetables on their plate, make a face out of cucumber slices and string beans. If this playfulness, a delaying action, isn’t perfect for balancing the meal, it’s great for creativity and exploration.
Play is its own kind of nourishment, but not only for recalcitrant children. For their part, grown-up professional chefs make gustatory mischief with food arrangements, especially with desserts. In France, wedding celebrations or baptism parties often feature a pastry tower called a croquembouche (freely translated: “mouth cruncher”). This conical, comical stack of cream puffs delights at least three senses.
With greater premeditation and subtlety, ingenious chefs will craft surprises. Fermenting berries to make an ice cream topping supplies a tangy, counterintuitive fizz. Play encourages novelty and thrives with it.
I once imagined a dinner party where all the food courses looked like something else. The entrée, for example, served in a parfait goblet, contained mashed potatoes at the bottom, browned spiced ground lamb in the middle, then a dollop of Greek yogurt garnished with chopped chives, and finished with a cherry tomato on top. A reverse, perverse shepherd’s pie. Play is pretending.
Mr. Potato Head, along with Mrs. Potato Head and the rest of the spuds, is the funniest and most pioneering example of food-inspired play in the toy industry.
The tater familias made their debut on commercial children’s television in 1952, making for a revolutionary marketing shift away from adults and toward kids as a pressure group. The toy initially supplied only facial features—eyes, eyebrows, ears, a mouth, and hats with prongs that could be pushed into a real potato or other vegetables to make a goofy head.
Marketing Food as Play
A full half-century before the playful spud appeared, Crackerjack boxes contained incentives, initially coupons for household items. But ten years later, the company pivoted to children, including little metal whistles, tin soldiers, and baseball cards in the packaging. A “Surprise in Every Box!” the effective marketing campaign proclaimed.
More recently and famously, the “Happy Meal” was packaged in printed boxes made to look like circus wagons, an innovation from the famous hamburger chain, meant to keep children amused while dining out. Soon, like Crackerjack, the containers included toys, at first mere jumbled plastic trinkets that appeared in the hundreds of millions. But by the 2000s, marketing had sharpened as the toys were compellingly tied to theatrical releases of Star Wars sequels. Guess who’s coming to dinner at McDonald's? Yoda, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia Organa.
Anticipation, Surprise, Food Chemistry, and the Brain
These action heroes offered as premiums in fast-food meals created one kind of anticipation with instant reward. But new technology advanced the appeal of fast foods in truly surprising ways.
Marketers had long known how to appeal to the taste buds of shoppers. Potato chip sellers taunted shoppers with a wager, “betcha can’t eat just one!” (Consumers lost that bet.) A corn chip company had snackers singing along, inviting customers to “munch a bunch.” They underlined helplessness with the funny lyric “it’s not polite to smack your lips, but you can't help it with Frito’s corn chips.” The allure of salt, fat, and carbohydrates is hard to resist.
An Irresistible “Bliss Point”
We are beginning to know why and how and even when snack foods compel us. Thanks to the alliance between marketers, food chemists, and neuroscientists, we are beginning to understand how modern ultra processed, ultra-palatable snack foods draw us, irresistibly.
Marketers once assembled “sensory panels” to judge the appeal of new snack foods. Producers now rely on food chemists to seek out and engineer a precise and compelling mix of salt, sugar, acid, spice, and fat to trigger the brain’s reward circuits. The influential psychophysicist and industry consultant, Howard Moskowitz, called this the “bliss point.”
Successful snack foods, data-driven, laboratory-tested and designed for appeal, work to override the “safety circuits” against over-eating that ordinarily obtain.
Test kitchens find the morsels that will best “melt in the mouth.” The moment-by-moment timing of taste and texture tricks the brain into thinking that the tasty snack has already been consumed. In this way you really “can’t eat just one” in the way that marketers of yore, un-bolstered with data, could not have foreseen.
The Double-Dopamine Hit
Jell-O shots are forthrightly obvious routes to intoxication at sports watch parties, and I’ll be the last to scold players for partying. I’m only against hijacking play for profit.
When irresistible noshes are wrapped into play, which is anchored by pleasure itself, eating them promises a double dopamine -hit. Nutritionists do not hesitate to employ the word addiction for the craving these snacks exert.
Consider the insidious fare featured on the coffee table between the couch and the TV during televised games. Manufactured flaming-hot cheese Munchos, processed greasy and delicious chips made with reconstituted corn flour and corn syrup. Some others, chips of the auspicious “kettle” variety, flavored with healthy-sounding sea-salt and olde-timey apple-cider vinegar, might also appear, only they seem more virtuous.
Snacking Is Not Playing
I see play as a process comprising six “elements” that begin in anticipation, surprise, and pleasure , that then proceed to deliver dividends in understanding, strength , and for the lucky, poise .
Unlike real, participatory, fulfilling, voluntary play, all those compelling salty puffs, unremitting cheesy twists and savory curls are stuck, trapped incompletely, in the first three Elements: anticipation, surprise, and pleasure .
Driven by diabolical marketing informed by neuroscience —"Betcha’ can’t eat just one!”—they offer reward without satisfaction.
Michael Moss, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” New York Times (February 20, 2013); Nicole M. Avena, “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Excessive, Intermittent Sugar Intake,” Neurobiological Review (2007); Scott G. Eberle, “The Elements of Play: Toward a Philosophy and a Definition of Play,” American Journal of Play (2014).
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Scott G. Eberle, Ph.D. , is the vice president for play studies at The Strong, editor of its American Journal of Play , and lead contributor to its re:Play Blog .
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