100 Calorie Packs

I've been staying at my sister's new fiance Nick's apartment up in Bedminster, NJ for the last three nights. They are both down in Disney World (Nick proposed to Katy at Magic Kingdom, after the fireworks display on Sunday evening) and I had a bunch of AmeriCorps activities up around here, so it made sense for me to camp out for a bit and apartment-sit. I packed a decent amount of food from home, but I couldn't help but open their cabinets in search of something to chomp on.

Nick, the fiance, eats healthily from what I can gather. He's got the whole wheat bread and the nuts and the Kashi. As for my sister, well, she is trying to eat healthily. She has lots of individually packaged snacks like goldfish and cheez-its and oreos that typically come in 100 Calorie Packs.

The idea here is that you will knowingly limit yourself to just 100 calories worth of snack, rather than sitting down in front of the TV with a family-size bag of potato chips and finishing the whole thing off. But, you see, my take on it is that by choosing to eat a 100 calorie pack, you are really agreeing to eat 100 calories. Why not just have one or two cookies instead of all five that they cram into the tiny bag? I guess that might take self-control, something my sister might not have when it comes to snacks.

The worst is the loving mom who pays a few extra bucks for a box of the neatly packaged 100 calorie packs for her titanic lacrosse-playing son. He comes back from practice very hungry, empties an entire pack into his mouth, says WTF it's already gone, and proceeds to empty another one. And another one. It's wasted money on the wastful packaging of trashy food.

100 calorie packs force you to eat in 100 calorie increments. If you want just a little taste of three different kinds of snacks, then you have to commit to eating 300 calories (unless you give away the rest of the packs to your fiance who really doesn't want them, but accepts them kindly anyway). And don't tell me that you don't have to eat the whole pack at once, because honestly, they don't make chip clips that small.

100 calorie packs don't seem to keep their snacks in one piece very well either. The bigger bags puff a bit of air into them to protect the product from crumbling during shipping. These smaller bags have no room for a coat of air protection, plus they are all jammed into an undersized box. Needless to say, the snacks in the 100 calorie packs are crummy.

The freshness of 100 calorie packs is analogous to a long loaf of Italian bread. The whole loaf stays fresh because all of the potential bread slices are still stuck together, protecting each other from becoming stale. Once the bread is broken into smaller parts, the bread becomes vulnerable and within hours it's inevitably hard and spoiled. The same thing happens when snack pieces are split into smaller groups.

100 calorie packs are also terrible from an environmental standpoint because they use much more plastic and cardboard in their packaging than their larger counterparts.

100 calorie packs: snacks distributed in excessive, environmentally-straining packaging for the purpose of helping people watch their weight, when actually inspiring more consumption of stale, partially damaged snack foods that we shouldn't be eating anyway.

Reese's peanut butter egg in hand, and now, in mouth--CHOMP!
Have a Happy Snacky Easter!

Andy