The food we buy is shrinking (2018)

Here&#x27;s an idea, stop constantly feeding yourself from companies who enjoy playing psychological pricing and ingredient&#x2F;filler games on massive scales. Chances are you have someone in your town who roasts coffee beans. Chances are there are local eggs you could be getting easy, or with a little more effort, harvesting your own. Stop feeding yourself and your offspring insanely high levels of sugar breakfast cereal. Have you realized that they skirt food definitions around you? When was the last time you bought real dairy iced cream? Why are we chlorinating chicken and pumping it full of saline solution for the shelves, again?<p>This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup?<p>Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.

To be cheeky, I didn&#x27;t see any real food in the picture nor the article. My fruit and vegetables aren&#x27;t getting any smaller.<p>Frankly, given the problems with health, diet, and obesity in most of the world, anything that makes more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food seems like a good thing. Like &quot;packaged food is ripping us off&quot; would be an excellent meme if it took any real hold. We&#x27;re dying.<p>I watched a video that compared the food we have in our convenience stores to what they have in Japan (fresh soups, vegetables, fish) and it really opened my eyes about how our lives&#x2F;health could be, and how effortless healthy choices could be. Until then, the only thing perishable at my local 7&#x2F;11 is a mealy saran wrapped apple and it has to somehow compete with all the tastier packaged food.

This theme always reminds me of the story Joel Spolsky related about optimizing the number of sesame seeds on a burger bun [0]. It may work for a while, but there is a logical lower limit to how small an ice cream container can be before it becomes a pint (e.g. pint plus 1&#x2F;32 oz?). But that is always the next guy&#x27;s problem, I suppose.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;theres-no-place-like-127001&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;theres-no-place-li...</a>

My favorite example of this in Canada is a brand of butter that is shaped&#x2F;looks exactly like a standard pound of butter when it sits on the shelf... but when you pick it up it&#x27;s actually half a pound of butter... as it&#x27;s only half as thick as you would expect it to be.<p>It&#x27;s usually priced higher than your average stick of butter as well.<p>I picked one up once, laughed, and have actively avoided looking at that brand ever since.<p>It&#x27;s been on the shelf for years now though so they must be making good money?

I make my own yogurt, my own ice-cream and maintain a wild-yeast culture for making sourdough. I roast my coffee in a popcorn popper for espresso. I make my own cookies, cakes, spice mixes, jam from raspberries on the back-yard and even some cleaning products. Sometimes I churn my butter.<p>But, still, found this article disturbing. I can&#x27;t make my own toilet paper, milk or cream (for the ice-cream). We need some more creative destruction on the economy.

This isn&#x27;t a remotely recent phenomena.<p>Back in the 90s when I was studying computer graphics I checked out a textbook on statistics and data visualization from the local library. I don&#x27;t remember the year it was published, but it was one of those old hardcover books with browning coarse paper pages and a dark linen lining on the exterior.<p>It was full of real world, hand-drawn visualizations, and one of the economic examples plotted Hersheys chocolate bar size per year across over a decade, with some other economic factor, GDP or some such. The text went a bit off on a tangent describing how the price of the bar stayed relatively constant but its volume varied in lockstep with the economy.<p>I doubt you could use the Hersheys bar today as an economic barometer since we have so much variety on the store shelves. Back then there was just one Hersheys bar... but they seem to have always manipulated its size over its price.

I never read the price per unit, I always read the price per liter, kg etc. and use that to compare products.

Given enough time, customers will eventually exit the market. Ex: I have completely stopped buying processed cereal (Cheerios etc) in favor of natural oatmeal.<p>I have a 40lb bag of oatmeal at home that will last 4 months. Also much healthier.<p>When I see tiny cereal boxes on a store shelf...I shake my head.

When I lived alone I ate a lot of convenience food and pre-made sauces and such, then I moved in with my partner and she cooks everything from scratch (she&#x27;s same age as me and Hungarian so she grew up under communism-lite where having your own animals and veg&#x2F;fruit gardens was common if you lived in the country).<p>Honestly I&#x27;d forgotten how <i>good</i> basic food tastes when it&#x27;s cooked fresh - she makes simple things like mashed potato amazing and she bakes a lot as well - she wastes no food, left-overs are used up as lunch or frozen.<p>The <i>really</i> stupid part of all this from my point of view was that our combined food bill from raw ingredients is about the same as what I was paying living alone.

I always thought cake pops were the ultimate expression of this idea about the smaller dessert.<p>Here is a single bite of cake.<p>(They sell them at Starbucks, I don&#x27;t know how much of a thing they are anywhere else. Actually I just realized I see the same idea in several restaurants with fancy little desserys in shot glasses. Still $6.50 for that one or two bites though.

I wonder if this shrinkage skews cost of living indices to any relevant degree. Changes to individual products may not amount to much money lost, but I could see them adding up in a non-trivial way that flies under the radar for most researchers.

I don&#x27;t understand what the problem is.<p>Either the value makes sense to you at the point of purchase or it doesn&#x27;t. What does it matter to anyone what it used to cost yesterday? This isn&#x27;t yesterday and you aren&#x27;t being offered the product at yesterday&#x27;s price, so forget about what happened yesterday. Take the current price or leave it.<p>The article talks about &#x27;sneakiness&#x27;. I don&#x27;t get it. Are they lying about the volume or weight of the product? No? So what on earth is the problem? Sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down. It&#x27;s not some secret conspiracy. Prices fluctuate, world markets and supply conditions change, labour prices change. Does he think it&#x27;s the job of a manufacturer of ice cream to protect him from the sands of time?<p>And for some of the examples in the article... do people really need larger servings of &#x27;fruit loops&#x27; of all things? Come on.

I still remember when 12 oz cans became 11.5 oz cans.

And yet my bmi keeps going up...perhaps they need to downsize some more...

The ultimate example of this is dollar stores like Dollar General.