There are few things as wonderful as getting to spend the winter holidays visiting family. But step into the kitchen of your parents, sibling, or in-laws and you risk being hit with a vexing reality: the way your relatives stock their fridge is just plain wrong!

If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone: There is an entire internet discourse on "snack households" versus "ingredient households", and its intensity peaks around the holidays.

In December 2021, the first definition for 'Ingredient House' was posted to Urban Dictionary — just two days before Christmas. It was definded as "a home that has no ready-to-eat foods or snacks, only the ingredients to make food."

The following Thanksgiving, this great middle-American unifier burst into the collective consciousness as TikTok creators home for the holidays began posting about the snacks they remember concocting growing up because their parents wouldn't buy snack foods.

In these videos, shredded Colby-Jack cheese is a common motif—whether melted over tortilla chips, crackers, a microwave safe plate, or simply eaten out of the bag by the fistful.

The sweetest common denominator among ingredient-bounded folks are bittersweet chocolate chips (also eaten out of the bag by the fistful).

Popular interest in the snack versus ingredient household debate reached its zenith at the end of 2022, but it has had remarkable staying power nevertheless, with the 2023 holiday season sparking another resurgence in interest as people travel home for the holidays once again and are reminded of the snack foods of their childhoods.

If one can embrace the occasional paltry spoon of peanut butter, there is another clear benefit of being a member of an ingredient household: food ingredient products get recalled at a much lower rate than prepared food products.

Through an analysis of FDA Enforcement Report data, this reporter found that prepared food products were recalled almost twice as often as ingredient food products. More processing steps create more opportunities for things to go wrong—as evidenced by the three recalls everyone's snack food darling, Trader Joes, faced over a single month last summer.

For those who find the prospect of a fistful of shredded cheese to be unbearably bleak, there is some comfort to be had in the soothing bureauspeak of one FDA spokesperson who consoled this reporter that "Food manufacturers have a responsibility to ensure that the food they produce for the United States market is safe and complies with the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act (the Act) and FDA’s implementing regulations. Food may not be prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions during any stage of production or distribution, and food manufacturers are subject to the Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food regulations for manufacturing, packing, or holding human food, among other requirements."