By "we," I really mean mothers, who bear the brunt of both snack logistics and snack guilt. As journalist Judith Shulevitz recently pointed out, although child-rearing is far more egalitarian than it used to be, mothers still get lumped with most or all of the "worry work": minutiae like permission slips, new sneakers or swimming goggles and, yes, snacks. Rather than sloughing off the tasks that aren't essential, though, we keep shouldering all of them without complaint. Or, like the mother at my friend's preschool, we hold them up as some masochistic gold standard of parenting.