So it’s come to this: the head of a Hollywood studio objects to popcorn, fercrissake.

One of the most powerful studio bosses in Hollywood … would like to see cinemas selling healthier snacks.

Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures, says that audiences would be better off nibbling on granola bars, fruit salad, yogurt and vegetable crudités with dips. “I can almost imagine the Romans eating popcorn and drinking Coke at the Colosseum 2,000 years ago,” he told a convention of cinema owners in Las Vegas. “But by bringing healthier snacks into your concession stands you would be helping our country meet an urgent public health need.”

I generally confine myself to a single pack of Raisinets, but I’ll be double-damned and pickled in brine before I’ll spend $7.50 for a medium-sized Yoplait.

Of course, Lynton doesn’t give a flip about that. Hollywood routinely extracts the lion’s share (in its literal sense, which means “damn near all of it”) of ticket-sale proceeds, which means that the cinemas have to make it up at the concession stand, and there aren’t enough soul-dead health obsessives out there to justify a Big Unbuttered Arugula.

If he wants to do the movie-going public a favor, this should be top of his list: Release better films. We eat more when we’re bored.

(Via Bill Quick, who properly styles “food nazis” in lowercase.)

I own a microwave oven. A small one. It is used for the lowest forms of cookery, by which I mean “warming up leftover pizza.”

(Certainly not so low as microwavable popcorn, which 98 times out of a hundred produces something so horrid and toxic you need hazmat assistance to dispose of the bag and gale-force winds rushing through the house to dispel the stench.)

It would never occur to me to do anything serious in the little metal box, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that:

My problem with the microwave, and my position against buying one lo these many years, is that they are essentially useless technology. By that, I mean that a microwave can’t do anything that another device can’t do better. Except the few things that it can do which are really not particularly needed.

Want to make a great meal fast? The pressure cooker can make a from-scratch meal just as fast and make it three times better. Microwaves seem to alter the texture of foods. And not for the better. By contrast, the pressure cooker infuses everything it cooks with concentrated flavor. My verdict: the ecological niche of “fast cooking” is more than adequately filled. No need for a microwave.

Even some of the crummier processed-to-death-and-then-some items I’ve been known to try out contain the following warning: “[Brand name] does not recommend microwave preparation.” When even vendors of extruded foodlike substances argue against it, you have to figure that something is dreadfully wrong somewhere.

Disclosure: Yes, when I was a newlywed, we had a genuine Amana Radarange, which weighed as much as a Delco battery and had damn near as much chrome as the Chevrolet that battery might have come out of. Someone actually stole the silly thing; I hope the hernia was worth it.

Mmm. Pass the fried chicken.

Rand Simberg is probably not going out to eat tonight:

I don’t go out to eat, generally, unless there is some compelling reason, because I don’t intrinsically enjoy it. I think that restaurants are intrinsically overpriced (not relative to their costs of doing business, but relative to their value to me compared to cooking at home), I don’t know for sure what’s in the food, and can’t get it exactly the way I like it, the portions are too large, particularly on the carbs (again, for economic reasons), and I really don’t enjoy other people serving or waiting on me, particularly when a tip is expected. I really prefer to do it myself (I have the same annoyance with luggage in hotels).

To me the only reasons to go out to eat are a) to eat something that I couldn’t make myself due to lack of time or ingredients (which is why I almost never go to a steak house), b) as a social occasion with others or c) I’m travelling away from home and have no other choice. But it’s not something about which I ever think, “Boy, I’d sure like to go out to eat in some fancy restaurant.”

I’m definitely a b and/or c type myself, albeit closer to c: I pretty much have to eat out when I’m on the road, but I have few social occasions otherwise. (The best of both worlds, of course, is to meet up with someone for a meal while I’m on the road, but this is not the most common of events.)

Along such lines, I said back in ought-six:

Of course, you’re paying for expertise and atmosphere; I can grill up a sixteen-ounce ribeye for $11 and eat it at the breakfast bar, or I can go someplace nice and pay three or four times as much. As a practical matter, though, I’m not going to worry until the Wendy’s Classic Double hits $5.

Last ribeye I bought, come to think of it, was $10.99 a pound.

I mean, sugar-free candy canes?

I’ve never been a fan of fake sugar. Splenda has a horrible aftertaste in my opinion and Stevia seems to have a licorice-like aftertaste for me. I think after some time you get used to the taste but I’m not willing to put the time or effort into that to save calories. A normal candy cane is around 50-60 calories, these candy canes are 30 calories. Which means you can eat 1 great tasting candy cane or 2 fake sugar candy canes.

Alternatively:

You can burn the extra 30 calories running to the trash can to throw away your sugar-free candy!!

Now there’s an approach I can get behind. And as slowly as I run, “behind” is the operative word.

If you see “silverfin” on the menu, it’s not a James Bond reference; it’s a rebranding of the hated (and officially-declared “invasive”) Asian carp:

The rebranding is part of a concerted marketing effort to solve the rampaging carp problem by making them into tasty meals. They could be on retail shelves in weeks.

Chef Philippe Parola has developed several recipes for the preparation of “silverfin,” and he’s heading to Las Vegas to pitch the fish to the National Grocers Association, reports the AP. He says the fish tastes like a scallop/crab mix, and “consumers will love it.”

This isn’t the first time fish have been renamed for commercial purposes: the highly-prized Chilean sea bass used to be known as the Patagonian toothfish.

(Tweeted by Fred First.)

And the result was something like this:

I know other bloggers often publish recipes. If I were to do so, it might look like this (from an, unfortunately, actual experience)

• 1 bowl of Cap’n Crunch
• Substitute ½ cup cheap vodka for milk
• Preparation notes: Never, ever do this again

Don’t tell me you’ve never tried to work up an emergency Bloody Mary with half a dozen ketchup packets and a couple of Alka-Seltzer.

I’ve never had so much as a smidgen of durian, despite Anthony Burgess’ lyrical description: “like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory.” Add to that the fruit’s reputed rancid-gym-sock bouquet, and you will not be surprised to hear that I have not been champing at the bit for actual durian-flavored candy:

It was all white, no different colored center. Biting into it, it was a little tangy like a yogurt chew. But then the real durian flavor. It’s a mix of strawberry and mirepoix. The onion notes weren’t completely revolting, it was like eating ice cream that had been stored in a smelly freezer … just off and not something that you’d think flavor-ologists would slave over and present to their bosses as something that should be placed in production.

I just hope the Altoids guys don’t read this and decide they need a Curiously Odoriferous Mint.

Gradual Dazzle whips up a batch of Aunt Bill’s Brown Candy, and before you ask, well, she already did:

Dunno who Aunt Bill was. No relation to us, as far as we know. It was just a recipe used by Mama Alice, who was my great-grandmother, and she had clipped it out of the Daily Oklahoman a zillion years ago.

For “a zillion,” read “seventy-seven”:

The recipe made its debut during the Oklahoman and Times-WKY Cooking School held in October 1932. The recipe has literally been stirred, handed down and shared across Oklahoma and the country ever since.

The cooking school was the second in an 11-year series in Oklahoma City. Susan Adams, the newspaper’s food columnist, was known as Aunt Susan. She presented the recipe to about 5,000 people each day at the school. It was printed in a 24-page souvenir pamphlet handed out during the five-day event.

Aunt Susan credited the recipe to “Aunt Bill,” whoever she may be:

Now the real secret of mixing these ingredients is to pour a very fine stream from the skillet into the pan. Aunt Bill always said to pour a stream no larger than a knitting needle while stirring across the bottom of the kettle at the same time.

The result is some sort of fudge/praline hybrid that you should probably not attempt to make yourself, because (1) it’s really easier to do with two people and (2) you’ll end up eating half the finished product anyway.

(Actual recipe may be found at the above links; I left it off here so as not to perplex John Salmon.)

The art of the restaurateur, it appears, extends to the preparation of the menu as well:

Unless a restaurant wants to frighten its customers, the price should always be at the very end of a menu description and should not be in any way highlighted.

A study published in the spring by Dr. [Sheryl E.] Kimes and other researchers at Cornell found that when the prices were given with dollar signs, customers — the research subjects dined at St. Andrew’s Cafe at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. — spent less than when no dollar signs appeared. The study, published in the Cornell Hospitality Report, also found that customers spent significantly more when the price was listed in numerals without dollar signs, as in “14.00″ or “14,” than when it included the word “dollar,” as in “Fourteen dollars.” Apparently even the word “dollar” can trigger what is known as “the pain of paying.”

Not having eaten out lately, I went hunting for menus, and OPUS Prime Steakhouse up on Memorial does exactly this: all menu items, excluding seafood priced at market rates, are listed in numerals without dollar signs.

Although restaurateur Danny Meyer says the cents are better left off:

Mr. Meyer said that in his view, adding zeros to the price, as in 14.00, is not a good idea because “there’s no reason to have pennies if you’re not using pennies, and it takes the price from being two digits into four digits, even if the two last digits are zeros. It’s irrelevant, and the number could feel more important, which is not a menu writer’s goal.”

But does it make the price look larger? Does “14.00″ look more expensive than “14.-” or simply “14″? (Incidentally, $14 won’t buy you an entree at OPUS.)

And if you for some reason are using pennies? Says menu consultant Gregg Rapp:

[I]f a restaurant wants to use prices that include cents, like $9.99 or $9.95 (without the dollar sign, of course), he strongly recommends .95, which he said “is a friendlier price,” whereas .99 is “cornier.”

Suddenly I’m starting to appreciate Arby’s five-for-5.55 special.

(Seen at Pratie Place.)

This goes for everybody up to and including your nearest pizza place:

Buying cheap cheese is worse than buying no cheese at all. When you have no cheese, you don’t waste time, energy, and other ingredients trying to make it edible.

Approximately a third of your grocer’s “dairy” case is occupied by some substance that, were it not enhanced by artificial coloring, would not even look like cheese; my informal analysis finds it to be something like 30 percent nonfat dry milk, 15 percent filtered biodiesel, 5 percent unfiltered biodiesel, 35 percent lawn clippings (contributes dietary fiber), and 15 percent Styrofoam.

How … hard … are they?

Times are so hard that when I went to the supermarket I was able to find package after package of chicken feet and claws, but not a single package of boneless chicken breasts.

With people hard up more and more of the cheaper cuts are being carried in larger and larger quantities, anything to stretch a dollar.

Of course part of it is the change in demographics, as little as 5-7 years ago it would have been almost impossible to find chicken feet and claws in this neck of the woods outside a specialty store.

I won’t ask him how the pork knuckles are moving.

Incidentally, I snagged an eight-piece box of fried chicken from the deli section of the supermarket Saturday, which is normally two each of the canonical four parts. A second drumstick, however, was not to be had at any price. (They gave me a third thigh instead. Googlewhack that, wisenheimers.)

I’ve had no luck producing Möbius bacon strips — darn stuff always burns on its one side — but apparently you can slice up a bagel according to Möbius’ design and get two linked bagel halves, which, owing to increased surface area, means more cream cheese or lox.

Wash it down with a Klein bottle of orange juice.

(Via Finestkind Clinic and fish market.)

Okay, nothing quite so startling as that. On the other hand, some day you’ll order a pizza, and this will matter to you:

Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?

And so there evolved a Unified Theorem of Pizza, which states the following:

[I]f you cut a pizza through the chosen point with an even number of cuts more than 2, the pizza will be divided evenly between two diners who each take alternate slices.

Otherwise:

[I]f you cut the pizza with 3, 7, 11, 15… cuts, and no cut goes through the centre, then the person who gets the slice that includes the centre of the pizza eats more in total. If you use 5, 9, 13, 17… cuts, the person who gets the centre ends up with less.

If you have $20 to spare, you could download the complete mathematical proof, or you could order a pretty darn big pizza. Make sure you tell them not to slice it.

(Via Jenn1964.)

Elisson explains the history of a Great American Cookie:

In case you were wondering, Fig Newton^® is a trademark of the National Biscuit Company, AKA Nabisco. It is not named for Isaac Newton, who discovered the principle of gravitic attraction that explains why your ass weighs so much more after you eat a whole package of Fig Newtons. Rather, it is named for the city of Newton, Massachusetts, a city whose inhabitants (one could surmise) enjoyed eating those eponymous confections… confections that, when consumed in sufficient quantities, could have a pronounced laxative effect.

In fact, the first Fig Newtons were made in nearby Cambridge (Our Fair City), Massachusetts, by the Kennedy Biscuit Company, circa 1891; Kennedy named all its products after Massachusetts communities, which makes me grateful they don’t sell something called Athol. Kennedy was one of the regional bakers that merged into Nabisco in 1898. (And the original bakery has now been converted to residential lofts.)

I have no doubt, though, that Elisson was correct: Newtonians could, and likely did, enjoy this definitive fig bar. Contrariwise, I doubt many folks staying at the Ritz ever indulged in Ritz crackers.

For that matter, so can you, without a great deal of effort:

Under no circumstances should you exercise between now and New Year’s. You can do that in January when you have nothing else to do. This is the time for long naps, which you’ll need after circling the buffet table while carrying a 10-pound plate of food and that vat of eggnog.

And it’s not like you’re going to be dipping into the eggnog in April, fercrissake.

A pack of Raisinets, please:

“Beware the Tubbocorn, my son!
The oils of fat, that clog like that!
Beware the tasty treat, and shun
The greasy butter vats!”

You should definitely read the whole thing. It’s downright frumious.

Because, as Elisson reminds us, everything is better fried:

The only reason we don’t fry every damn thing we eat — like breakfast cereal — is because everything would taste so good, we’d never leave the table to accomplish any meaningful work. Plus, we’d all weigh half a metric ton and would have to hire people with wet mops to clean us after we crapped our living room-sized beds … which would be located as close as possible to the kitchen. No: that way lies madness.

Now to develop a suitable batter for Frosted Mini-Wheats. But first:

It was only a matter of time before somebody figured out that gefilte fish — that classic staple of the Ashkenazic Jewish table — would also taste better fried.

It’s a simple dish, really. Just take slices or loaves of gefilte fish, dip in egg wash, and coat with a suitable breading. Panko is fine, but for real authenticity, why not use matzoh meal? Season it with salt and pepper, blend well, and you’re ready to coat your fish. Then drop it into a deep fryer until golden brown.

Don’t even think about this around Yom Kippur.

Necco wafers, the world’s leading edible tiddlywinks, have gone “All Natural”:

The revamped product is now using red beet juice, purple cabbage, cocoa powder, paprika and turmeric to replace the artificial ingredients that had been flavoring and coloring the wafers for years.

The little discs will look different, however:

“The flavor is actually a little bit stronger in the new ones because they are all natural,” Jackie Hague, Necco’s vice president for marketing, told Slashfood. “And when you look at them, they’re pastel and not as bright as they used to be.”

And one color/flavor is totally AWOL:

[L]ime did not get through the makeover. While the lime flavor could be created with natural ingredients, the color green itself was too hard to duplicate, so it was scrapped. However, it may return once the color code is cracked.

(Via a very unimpressed Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

The Tulsa State Fair is continuing at this writing, and, public-spirited as always, the Irritated Tulsan has a list of safety tips, including this one I should immediately commit to memory and/or take to heart:

After you eat a deep-fried item, use the stick to poke a hole in your side. This will allow the oil to drain.

In fact, now I’m wondering if some of us couldn’t benefit by having a valve installed at an appropriate location.

Her Radishness encounters them at JFK:

After standing in line for five hours, I was able to drag my carcass into a chain restaurant for a burger and a beer.

It took me 15 minutes to figure out what all those three-digit integers on the beer list meant.

They put the freaking calorie counts on the BEER LIST.

And, having seen them, she did the only proper thing. She ignored them:

Obviously, this had no impact on my order. I would drink store brand beer from a can before I would order MGD64 (nasty AND weak), and diet soda is not beer. As it was, I had to settle for a Sam Adams, as the airport franchise did not have the bountiful taps of the standalone franchise I visit most frequently.

You can do worse than a Sam Adams, and I admit I often have. But that’s not the issue, really:

[T]his just means the anhedoniacs who demand everyone live as joylessly as they do are going to push government to restrict menus.

It’s just a matter of time, though I suspect it’s not anhedonia at work, but pure secularism: after all, beer, as Ben Franklin didn’t exactly say, is proof that God loves us, and such things must be expunged from the public sphere lest we develop unsocial habits like gratitude to the Almighty.

Apparently there exists carbon-free sugar:

TYWKIWDBI points out:

Let’s see … sugar is C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Subtract the carbon…

That leaves H₂₂O₁₁ = H₂O.

In retrospect, I should probably be grateful I gave up the idea of becoming a chemist.

Of course, what they’re trying to say is that they bought enough indulgences from some medieval Pope carbon credits to offset the production, but someone else can mock them for that.

(Seen in TJICistan.)

Every last bit of it, says Lisa, if you expect your tomato marmalade to come out correctly:

[H]ere’s where it gets tricky: that orange and that lemon. Turns out you have to carefully peel off the zest which is the thinnest uppermost part of the peel and DON’T WHATEVER YOU DO GET A SPECK OF THE PITH, THAT NASTY WHITE STUFF, WITH IT. Okay, my cookbook author didn’t exactly write those instructions that way or in capital letters but I sensed the urgency. She didn’t explain exactly what would happen if I inadvertently allowed pith to contaminate my zest. Bitterness? A dangerous chemical reaction? A meth lab like explosion? Note to cookbook writers: We laypeople like to know these things.

Much to everyone’s relief, the very first commenter explained it all:

You don’t want the pith because it is bitter and can make reduced dishes like jellies and jams especially bitter.

Direct enough. Even, as Lisa noted, pithy.

Me, I consider myself fortunate that I knew what “pith” and “zest” were.

This looks like a fairly-entertaining mission:

My 28th birthday is Thursday. I have an annual tradition of getting as much free food during the week of my birthday as I possibly can by signing up for Internet mailing lists for all the restaurants in the city and its suburbs. It started when I was a poor college student and couldn’t afford to eat food outside the college’s cafeteria. Now, it’s just fun. I’ve gotten more free food offers this year than ever before, so by the time Thursday comes around, I may be sick from all the overeating, or I may gain 20 pounds, but as my mom says, “you only live once, so you may as well do what you want.”

It’s not going to be entirely free, of course — it costs money to get around, and most of the deals are of the Buy A, Get B nature — but still, this seems like it could be quite enjoyable, and gaining 20 lb in five days seems exceedingly unlikely. (If it actually could happen, you’d already be reading about how such-and-such actor bulked up for his role in Continuation Sequel, Part II using exactly such a regimen.)

Let’s just suppose that the bane of your existence is McDonald’s, that iconic vendor of exactly the sort of semi-tasty foodlike substance that turns the heart of the Nanny State colder than a Shamrock Shake. Were it within your power, you’d transport yourself as far away from Mickey D’s as you possibly could. Then again, perhaps you’re not interested in spending the rest of your life in Queen Maud Land: you’re not about to leave the States. There’s always Alaska, but — no?

Okay, here’s where you want to be: a few miles northwest of Glad Valley, South Dakota, just off SD 20. Stephen Von Worley has calculated this to be the McFarthest Spot, 145 miles via rural two-lane — 107 miles as the crow flies, assuming you can get a crow to eat this stuff, and based on my observations of urban blackbirds, I’m certain you can — to the closest Big Mac.

The author does not guarantee that McDonald’s will refrain indefinitely from locating a restaurant in this McFree Zone. And should you find a Dairy Queen, you’re on your own.

One of the films I seem to know almost by heart is My Favorite Year, a fond look back at 1950s television comedy, directed by Richard Benjamin, probably with Mel Brooks breathing down his back: Mad Mel’s Brooksfilms distributed MFY, and the Caesar’s Hour-like program at the center of the story is something Brooks literally does know by heart.

This is not to say that I get every last reference in the film, however. There’s a scene wherein writer Benjy Stone (aka Benjamin Steinberg, played by Mark Linn-Baker) actually starts to win over production assistant K. C. Downing (Jessica Harper) by plying her with Chinese takeout: as he explains, “Jews know two things: suffering, and where to find great Chinese food.”

All these years I assumed this was some sort of a goof. (And nobody goofs on Jews like Mel Brooks, right?) Then today I stumbled upon this:

[Just received this message in a Shana Tovah (happy new year) e-card. Enjoy.]

According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5769.

According to the Chinese calendar, the year is 4706.

This means that Jews went without Chinese food for 1,063 years.

This period was known as the Dark Ages.

Which, of course, made me think of Benjy Stone and his boxes of takeout — if there’s one thing that amazes me about me, it’s the sheer efficiency with which I make connections to things I should have forgotten by now — and so I had to find out: what’s the deal, anyway?

Apparently it’s this:

What do Jews do on Christmas? They eat Chinese and go to the movies.

Eat Chinese because those were the only restaurants open on Christmas. Go to the movies because all the Christians were home, and you could get into the theater without waiting on line.

That the Chinese are not Christian is important to understanding the appeal of the Chinese restaurant to Jews. If you went to an Italian restaurant, which, aside from the coffee shop, the luncheonette, or the deli, was likely the only kind of restaurant in your neighborhood before the American food revolution, you might encounter a crucifix hanging over the cash register, or at least a picture of the Madonna or a saint. That was pretty intimidating to even a nonobservant Jew. The Chinese restaurant might have had a Buddha somewhere in sight, but Buddha was merely a rotund, smiling statue — he looked like your fat Uncle Jack. He wasn’t intimidating at all.

But … it isn’t kosher, is it?

The Chinese don’t combine dairy and meat in the same dish, as Italians do — in fact, the Chinese don’t eat dairy products at all. And the Chinese cut their food into small pieces before it is cooked, disguising the nonkosher foods. This last aspect seems silly, but it is a serious point. My late cousin Daniel, who kept kosher, along with many other otherwise observant people I have known, happily ate roast pork fried rice and egg foo yung. “What I can’t see won’t hurt me,” was Danny’s attitude.

I think I should probably back off before I get into more trouble.

There are several things I do fairly well in the dark, and a few I may not have done especially well but greatly enjoyed while they were going on. Except as prelude, however, none of them involved going out to dinner:

Imagine a San Francisco dining experience like no other. In a pitch-black dining room, each flavor and texture greets enthusiastic senses hungry for an awareness once brought by sight. This is Opaque, San Francisco’s first dark dining restaurant.

A brilliant experimental dining concept that originated in Europe, dark dining allows food to stir the senses in the most unique way. Each burst of spice, each hint of sweetness, each touch of tang stands out, yielding an entirely new appreciation of fine cuisine. Under the expert guidance of Chef de Cuisine Mike Whang (of the popular Indigo Restaurant), the menu at Opaque in San Francisco cultivates a multi-sensory adventure with an array of options woven into a three-course prix fixe meal.

And a good thing it’s prix fixe, too, because I’d hate to pore over the menu under those conditions.

But maybe I’m just missing the point:

Upon arrival at their allotted reservation time, guests will begin their journey into depravation by turning off all cell phones and checking any purses or bags with the hostess in the lounge, since they’ll not be needed in the dark dining room. Guests are welcomed to relax in the lighted lounge, order a round of specialty cocktails and select the three courses that will make up their prix fixe menu. Once they have ordered, they’ll be guided into the darkened dining room for a dining experience unlike any other. While not all patrons dine at the same time, great care is taken to make sure that the seating of other tables does not disrupt the experience for those who are already seated. Guests will be guided and served by visually impaired individuals that have been specially trained to serve in the dark and tend to the varying needs of each patron in a comfortable and reassuring way.

Okay, that explains the menu. But where do they find “visually impaired” waitstaff? Do they advertise on craigslist or in the Chronicle? And how long does it take them to figure out if you’re a rotten tipper?

Still, as the saying goes, you knock out one sense, the other four compensate:

A highly sensual experience, dining at Opaque challenges the way patrons perceive their surroundings and cuisine. Feeling for a fork, running fingers along inviting tabletops, recognizing only the voices of companions, drawing in sweet and savory aromas, identifying each ingredient and spice as they eclipse the palate.

“Oh, lord, what did I just dunk the end of my tie into?”

Maybe I’ll just order a pizza at sunset and forget to turn on the lights.

(Via John Rosenberg.)

Stan Geiger pops open a bag and is unhappy with what he sees:

I don’t usually buy potato chips. I mean crap like that has no food value, and it is way yonder overpriced. But I had a coupon, so I decided to indulge. I paid $1.88 for a bag of potato chips. Even with the coupon, I’d say I probably paid about four times what the bag was worth.

I popped the bag open today. An optimist would say it was half full. I’d say it was half empty.

All the talk is about being green these days. Maybe we should start with a federal law that says any container in a grocery store has to be full.

Which would be tricky in the matter of potato chips, since they tend toward fragility — if they didn’t, you probably wouldn’t want to eat them — and the more you cram, the more you break.

Still, the alternative is worse: Pringles, a compressed-floor-sweepings product of Procter & Gamble (!) that fits in a cardboard can, or Stax, Frito-Lay’s answer to Pringles, which fits in a plastic can.

Aside: P&G got into a legal fuss with the Brits, in fact; potato chips, or “crisps” as they’re known in the UK, are, unlike most foods, subject to the 15-percent VAT, and P&G had argued that Pringles were exempt due to insufficient potato content. A court ruled in their favor, but a higher court sided with Her Majesty’s Government.

This point, however, seems indisputable:

Back in the day, one could go to a neighborhood butcher and buy some meat. The meat would be wrapped in paper. The purchaser took it home and cooked it. On the same day I bought some chips, I bought some sandwich meat. It was wrapped in plastic and encased in a plastic container that was twice the size of the meat packed inside.

Aside from the fact that all this oversized packaging is aimed at screwing people, aimed at making people believe they are getting more for their dollars than they actually are, it’s wasteful. If you want to go green, cool. Let’s look beyond the bags in which the stuff you buy is carried home. Let’s look at the packaging of the stuff you buy.

Package manipulation falls under the deadly beam of what the Consumerist calls the “Grocery Shrink Ray,” a common ploy to give you less for your money without your knowing it.

There are, however, still plenty of supermarkets with actual butchers on hand, and I generally prefer to buy meats and such wrapped in paper, with maybe a thin plastic liner to ward off leakage, rather than the prepack stuff of unknown provenance that comes with a huge plastic tray.

Tuna Helper has now apparently devolved into Tuna Community Organizer:

A few days ago, I was toying with the notion of whooping up a batch. I wasn’t sure I had the goodies necessary, however. I read the instructions and found I was woefully lacking. I had no tuna and my milk had gone bad. So much for that dinner plan.

But in the course of my reading, I found something new. The instructions now call for two cans of tuna, not one.

Pathetic. The amount of tuna in a can of tuna is now so small the recipe for Tuna Helper had to be changed. Of course, unless you have x-ray vision, you can’t see what you are buying when you grab a can from the shelf.

You could always ask Jessica Simpson.

Now playing at CakeSpy: The Little Debbie Death Match!

No, really:

What have you done? A side by side comparison of several Little Debbie treats to see which one will rise victorious through various challenges. Winners were determined simply: at the end of each challenge, which seemed the most edible? (Though, as a disclaimer, we did not eat them afterward)

Four full rounds of snack-cake torture. No wagering, please.

(Found at Pop Culture Junk Mail.)