certified cheezie hater

What online backlash against snack preferences can teach about nationalism and cultural narrowing

Let the records show that I, Sarah Duignan, am a certified Cheezie hater. The Cheezie is a hard-bite snack, coated in real Canadian cheese and made from extruded American corn. Made by Hawkins out of Belleville, Ontario, it is a snack that threatens to unfurl across your pant legs and couch and carpet at a moment’s notice. I dislike the texture, the squeak when you bite in, the way you have to nearly scrape it off fingertips to function again. These facts are mundane, and yet ones that got me nearly cancelled on Threads the other week.

While grocery shopping in early June, I noticed an anomaly: one of the display bins that dotted the lines between frozen foods and yogurts, dairies, and creams had a half-rifled pile of Hawkin’s Cheezies. I took a quick picture, always on the lookout for displays of grocery store politics. In sharing this online, I framed it to be odd. When has a giant bin of discount Cheezies ever been emptied out so quickly? For a snack that has gone unchanged for decades, one that damply sits uneaten at many a pool party? But in doing this, I had forgotten an important consideration: apparently, a lot of Canadians simply adore Cheezies.

Differences of opinions around snack foods is an expectation, if not an occasional sport. Yet with this, there was a specific, urgent rage in response to my truculent comment. After 23,000 views and a hurricane of cheese-dusted refutes, I realized I was mistaken. Cheezies are, perhaps, an ideal representation of national rhetoric in 2025, though not in the way most would suspect. Love for Cheezies, and the backlash against any who defy them, are representative of Canadian nationalism in a trade war, and how it narrows a focus. Tied into corporate myths around food stories and authenticities, it also speaks honestly to the strangeness of American and Canadian tensions and relationships, too.

corporate mythologies

Cheezies represent something important for many (white, mostly middle-aged) Canadians—or at least, those on Threads. They garner national affection thanks to the values espoused in their production practices and ingredient-sourcing. I’m told by strangers that Hawkins is great to their workers, because they give them weekends off, and close early on Fridays. I’m told that people’s parents, sisters, wives, and aunts have worked there for over 30 years, and I’m insulting them in not liking their products. I’m intrigued, because I am nearly always skeptical of labour conditions at manufacturing companies, let alone ones that highlight they treat their workers like family.

Food historian Janis Thiessen graciously explored the narrative complexities surrounding Hawkins in Snacks: A Canadian Food History. She adeptly pointed out that these beloved features are parts of a broader corporate mythology, where stories and myths are used to provide a general explanation, an overall sense of meaning, and ensure that a product remains in place for a future. Hawkins, as she sees it, “contains a few key stories: Cheezies as sole product, the absence of advertising, Hawkins as a family company, and Hawkins as part of Canadian identity.”

In creating these folklores about a singular Cheezie product, Hawkins can transform how Canadians understand and interact with it. In truth, Hawkins is originally an American company, launched initially by W.T. Hawkins as Confections Incorporated in Chicago and spreading across America. It was a company so large that it once turned down offers to merge with Frito-Lay due to scale in the 1940s. Eventually, Confections Incorporated declared bankruptcy in America, thanks to a variety of stunning factors: multiple bad divorces costing Hawkins, and trouble brewing with Teamsters Unions and the Mafia, as Thiessen unearths. It wasn’t bad business, but bad personal choices that led to Hawkins Canadian rebrand.

Like many American manufacturers of the time, there was an existing factory operating in Canada since 1949, which became the new and sole focus after the bankruptcy. Thiessen spoke with former developers and employees for Cheezies, such as Jim Maker. Jim, an Ohio farmer, developed the machine used to extrude the corn and process it efficiently. Marker had developed this to feed his cattle more efficiently, but transformed this “cow mulch” into “human snack food.” Marker also explained the interest in Canada as being both economic and practical, thanks to the ability to pay low wages in a predominantly women-run production team:

“The work involved was not high-tech. It did not need highly skilled workers. They worked hard and at the end of the day they earned themselves a wage just like everyone else.”

As the company became more known for its singularly famous Cheezie, it hid the failures and bygone products, like potato chips, Magic Pop popcorn, and small fry donuts. Cheezies were not deliberately chosen to ensure a quality of tradition, but rather one that was circumstantial: it was easier to stack up hardened cheese puffs than fragile chips with limited Ontario storage facilities. Even their shapes, which came about as “consequence of the manufacturing process,” became framed as deliberate, intentional decisions.

And while the cheese is really sourced from Canada, the corn is sourced from America. While Cheezies are framed as significant to Canadian identity for their local sourcing, the omissions of Canadian and US trade relations serve to complicate the flattened story.

internet rage

Nestled within the Cheezie backlash was an important lesson in the new silhouette of social media. Here, to disagree with other Canadians on taste is to position myself precariously, to allegedly call my entire nationality into question. Threats of revoking my passport, gagging on Cheezies, calling me stupid, or telling me to shut my “dirty mouth” piled up over the course of a workday. Some went further, rage-baiting me across older and innocuous posts of lemon cakes and podcast episodes, accusing me of performing for Americans, or for being a bad Canadian.

This occurrence solidified what I had long suspected about Threads in particular (and algorithm-driven social media generally). People are acting angrier, more violent, and more detached from reality.

kate lindsay

of Embedded describes these turns as “casual and, for some reason, normalized disregard for anyone but yourself online, one that either assumes the worst, or sees the receiver as an inanimate punching bag on which you can take out your random frustrations.”

Similarly,

Kathleen Schmidt

of Publishing Confidential shared her frustrations around the toxicity of Book Threads. She recounts her experiences with the platform shifting in tone, only with a focus on how accusatory and vicious the chatter about upcoming books and authors has turned. It validated my own experiences to see both Schmidt and Lindsay speak to these issues. The wash of anger just for the sake of it, directing all the pent up worries, fears, anxieties, and anger around the economic disarray toward an anonymous online punching bag.

Quietly, through private texts and DMs, this is something I’ve spoken with many other women online about. There is an outrage beyond what would be considered reasonable or rational, a targeted anger towards women expressing themselves online, and an increased feeling that it is unsafe. Online disinhibition effect is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that has rapidly changed in our current context. We have fascism and billionaire tech bros goading the anonymous users to be more aggressive. There is also a layer of relatability that is expected of people, and particularly women, on the internet.

I think quickly to the backlash author Katie Kitamura received for her $25 Clinique Pop Plush creamy lip gloss choice in an interview with New York Magazine. Again, a seemingly superficial issue against Kitamura’s gift for sparse and haunting prose. Smaller still, considering the trendiness of similarly priced lip glosses with younger generations: Summer Fridays Lip Butter Balms, Rhode’s Peptide lip treatments, or Dior’s Addict Lip Glow Oil.

All to say, the idea of being relatable on the internet is a precarious and ephemeral thing.

Alicia Kennedy

, in an essay against relatability and its feminized expectations, argued that “relatability is the bottom of the barrel in terms of building a just, functional society. Relatability doesn’t build solidarity; it makes for bland replication and cliques.”

It is this point I continue to mull over, particularly as it relates to the commodification of cheap snack products tossed in a barrel and put on sale by a megalith grocery store to continue leaching profits from Canadians. This time last year, there were large national outbursts and boycotts against the very stores that are now hawking Hawkins. If I am relatable for liking a snack they’re selling, does that make me a good Canadian or a good consumer?

I poked a hornet’s nest, certainly. Unknowingly, I came for Canadians who really love the overly salty, chunky, chalky, crunchy Cheezies. And with that, there came a displacement of personhood in responses. I am in no way a big personality on the Internet and yet could feel the algorithm working in its hate-god ways to ensure a big, bolstered, amplified reach thanks to early negative comments. It feels insidious.

cultural narrowing

I understand my own individual concerns within a larger tapestry of socioeconomic challenges in Canada. Canadians as a populace, in the white and heterogenous way, seek to be relatable, quiet, and in line with the status quo. I lucked out in having my mandatory Grade 10 history class be taught by a Métis woman, in that she taught us how to really, properly look at Canada and it’s dark and quiet histories. Before it was mandated to speak of residential schools, Sixties Scoop, and its violent legacies, she was there at the front of the class speaking to it. The long-hailed “politeness” and “apologetic” temperaments serve as masks. This is seen readily in mainstream Canadian journalism hushing coverage on Palestine, to the point where journalists have stepped out to address it. We are a polite society, which tends to mean that passive aggressive actions are the way to go about a disagreement.

Stacey Lee Kong writes about her uneasy feelings with Canadian nationalism and flag-related pride (not the good Pride, but the trucker convoy pride) in her newsletter Friday Things. Kong identifies similar concerns and anxiousness around recent Canadian campaigns that I’ve had, where it is “less about economic change and more about rhetoric.” She frames the strangeness of recent campaigns towards an economic nationalism in Canada as a narrowing. In practice, narrowing is “both of what it means to belong in and to a country, and who gets to claim that belonging.”

Narrowing who gets to be Canadian underlies my concerns about Cheezie anger. I’m white, Canadian-born, and by any visible measure someone that these online haters would see as “belonging” in this Elbows Up landscape we’ve found ourselves in. But I’m also not a nationalistic person. I deeply value having grown up Canadian, but “loving” a country is a complicated thing. To me, being Canadian in the modern sense is to understand how much settlers have stripped Indigenous and Black experiences out of the fabrics of our land and histories, and how this continues to benefit some at the expense of others.

At worst, I get cancelled from a throng of strangers for my disagreement over snacks. But it’s how this narrowing becomes more expansive through time: first it is non-Canadian snacks and politics that get ousted from popular polite society, and then it’s non-white workers, non-white Canadians, and anything or anyone deemed a foreign opponent. Already, we’re seeing rash laws proposed here that would cancel, suspend, change, or cancel immigration documents with immediacy if deemed “in the public interest.”

It’s a caution: the consequences of leaning too hard into nationalism is a lesson we can looking at the Trump administration. I’m all for Elbows Up when it means more national conversations about building resilient and robust local and regional economies. There’s certainly new space emerging for people to consider what our collective future looks like in breaking ties with American rhetoric and politic. Yet if I can post some mundane distaste of a Cheezie and have someone threaten passport revoking (even in jest), I suspect we’re gonna need a bigger conversation.

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