The case of the mysterious shrinking packaged foods

Has anyone else noticed that their groceries are shrinking? My suspicions arose a while back with ice cream cartons. We don't buy a lot of ice cream, but I do stare longingly into the frozen foods window some days… What struck me was that the 'half gallons' of many of the brands displayed no longer lined up. They'd staggered the shelves, so that it'd be less obvious that some of the cartons weren't as tall as they used to be, or as big around. If you examined the fine print, you'd see that most are not even half a gallon any more. They're just a few ounces lighter now, but smaller is smaller. The catch is that they are being sold at the old price. The price you've got used to paying.

I think they're doing the same thing with loaves of bread, boxes of cereal and crackers, and most packaged foods. No amount of searching in my vast store of old bread bags was able to prove my theory, and unfortunately Mondays are way too busy for me to go to the grocery store and take clandestine pictures of the weights of various packaged foods. Clearly, I need to do something about the plastic bags I've already got. If I'm not careful, there could be an explosion and they'll take over the house. We might never be found:

While I understand that food is getting more expensive, I'm not sure what I think about this sneaky downsizing. It's well known that Americans pay less for food than most people in the world. Slowly, as our foods shrink, maybe the prices will start to catch up to what others in the rest of the world are paying. Although, you might start seeing revolts when the 'gallon' of milk begins to yield only a glass or two, or the loaf of bread merely a few slices. Some foods would be pretty hard to mess with -- say, a dozen of eggs. And with certainty you won't see any marketing claims along the lines of 'Same big box! Just Emptier!' or 'Smaller loaf! Same great price!'

The other thing is that I do a bit of this downsizing myself. You know how you get one of those tiny little salad plates at a buffet? I regularly serve my kids soup in a puny custard dish. I use the smallest dishes in my cupboard. My hope is that we'll waste less food this way, and not stuff ourselves. I don't mind serving seconds, or even thirds if they're really still hungry. And it does spare me the pain of watching them push their food around on 12-inch dinner plates.

So maybe grocery downsizing is a good thing in disguise? In our super-sized nation with obscenely low food prices, it might behoove us to get used to paying more for food. Perhaps we'll have less on hand to spoil? Beats me. Maybe I should just shut my pie hole and start baking my own bread instead of throwing around crazy food downsizing conspiracy theories. What do you think?

By the way, I recently heard of two good websites all about preventing food waste that you might enjoy checking out:

• One from the good ol' US of A: WastedFood.com
• And another from the UK: LoveFoodHateWaste.com

Happy Monday everyone. I need to go figure out if I have enough leftover meatloaf to turn it into spaghetti sauce for tonight's dinner.