An ominous sleight-of-hand is occurring all over Supermarket Land. Food products and packaging are slowly getting miniaturized.  For years manufacturers have been progressively selling us less product for more money. But over the past two years, the shaving-of-contents has been getting as obvious as America’s prodigious waistlines. Maybe the manufacturers are on a quest to help us with our obesity. But I don’t think so. I think they’re ripping us off. If they keep up this pace, pretty soon, we’ll all be buying empty boxes.

Take national brands of canned tuna, for example. Have you noticed that the old six-ounce can is now a five-ounce can? You could say this was an effort to save us from extra mercury poisoning, but the truth is more sinister. They are trying to STARVE US. I used to be able to make two, normal-sized tuna sandwiches from one can. Now I can make only a sandwich and a half from their new anemic can. What? Did they think we wouldn’t notice that we didn’t have enough tuna to make two normal sandwiches? Aside from sandwich making, look at any other recipe that calls for tuna. The directions state to use “one six-ounce can of tuna.” Well, that only leaves Trader Joe’s tuna because they still have the decency to sell their tuna in six-ounce cans. Forget Chicken-of-the-Sea (which is an apt name for a company that rips off their customers but aren’t upfront about it) or Starkist or any of the major brands, they’ve all gone to five-ounce cans. Bastards!

Not only have they stolen tuna from me, this Christmas the food people really crossed a line when they messed with my sugar. I was shopping at my local Safeway and saw sugar was on sale. I wanted it for holiday baking, but was concerned about picking up the five-pound bag because I’d recently thrown out my shoulder and could barely pick up a letter without excruciating pain. Still, I needed sugar. But something about the bag looked wrong. It looked smaller. Since my eyesight is going and I had just ordered glasses, I assumed it was my vision that had the problems. When I picked up the bag, I felt no pain, surprising me. At first, I thought I’d miraculously healed in the three-block drive to the store. I thought I had somehow gotten stronger. More buff. The bag seemed much lighter than normal. And my entire hand fit around the bottom of the package. I checked the weight printed on the bottom of the bag and gasped. Then snarled. Four pounds. After a zillion freakin’ years of selling sugar in five-pound bags, they shaved off a pound and didn’t expect us to notice? Thieves! Charlatans! Again, you could spin this and say they were worried about the over-sugaring of America, but we know better. They are ripping us off!

I continued on my unmerry way to the cereal aisle, always good for a little blood boiling. The cereal aisle has been a thorn in my side for years. Cereal manufacturers been playing fast and loose with packaging, contents and prices since I can remember. I’ve watched the price of Cocoa Krispies go from about a buck a box in the late seventies to four bucks plus over the past couple years. Since I am addicted to Cocoa Krispies, I grit my teeth and pay their price. But this time when I picked up the box, it looked strange. Thinner and taller. Again, I attributed the change to my eyesight, but when I got home and put the box next to my nearly-empty Cocoa Krispies box, I couldn’t believe it. The new box was nearly a full inch thinner. For the same price. And because it’s so thin and tall, the box is super unstable and keeps falling over. So where the hell are they going to go from here? I’m sure they have a team of engineers working on this stability issue. “Bob? We need a cereal box the thickness of a National Geographic, but as tall as the previous box. And it needs to stand on its own. Maybe we ought to play around with weighted bottoms. You think the idiots will notice?” You know they must refer to their consumer base as morons and idiots because how else would they expect to pull this Houdini-disappearing-contents trick on us. Rotten jerks!

Last week, I was back at Safeway, picking up OJ for Frank. After taste-testing many brands years ago, Frank chose Tropicana. And only Tropicana. No other OJ will do. So I reached for the half-gallon container and happened to glance down at the contents labeling. 59 ounces. WHAT? I looked again. The label still said 59 ounces. I nearly screamed. Now not only did they think I was so stupid I didn’t know that there were 64 ounces in a half-gallon, but they stole five ounces of orange juice from me and I hadn’t even bought the carton yet! So I didn’t. I shoved the box back in the refrigerated display and searched for a brand that still sold me a half-gallon of juice. Of course, Frank was not happy with the Minute Maid and so now, every time I buy the stupid Tropicana Rip-off Juice, my blood-pressure rises so high, my eyeballs throb.

Where will this all end? What’s next? Five-packs of beer and soda? One stick of gum per package? A single, sad, lonely Cocoa Krispy taped to the bottom of a giant, paper-thin box?

And how will all this product-shaving effect our vernacular? Will we be saying things like: “Hey, check out that dude’s awesome five-pack abs.” “Honey, could you pick up 59 ounces of milk for me?”

I can see the future when product miniaturization hits the fast food industry. “Hey, can you super-shrink that order for me?” “Sure,” the pimply-faced order taker replies. “Would you like fry with that?”

©2011, Janet Periat

Last night, I watched the movie Julie/Julia. For me it was a shining example of what’s wrong with our current culture and why people are so miserable. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie is a juxtaposition of two lives. A thirty-year-old blogger in New York who, in one year, cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking, and of Julia Child’s twelve-year-journey to create the cookbook. The movie highlights the differences between two paradigms: our current system-dependent, consumer culture versus a model that focuses on personal fulfillment, discovery and self-reliance, and how the models differ markedly in producing happiness.

Julie is a woman of 30, lost, self-centered, blocked and miserable. She is the epitome of the unhappy, dependent consumer and part of the unfortunate Self Esteem generation, a monstrous creation of parents my age. When we went to school in the sixties and seventies, all the emphasis and attention was on the boys and high-achievers and the rest of us were pretty much ignored or maligned. Our parents were more interested in cocktail parties than parenting. So many of us came out of the school system feeling alone with low self-esteem. We thought over-involving ourselves in our kids’ lives would help build self-esteem and would help them accomplish more. We thought that by giving our kids trophies for “participating” we’d make them feel good about themselves. We thought shoving them into endless Chinese lessons and ballet lessons would make them accomplished. We thought by tethering ourselves to our kids via cell phones and helping them make all their decisions would make them strong.

What we didn’t realize is that we undermined them more. We became a hyperextension of an already flawed paradigm. We reinforced the idea that kids can’t do things on their own. We gave them a skewed version of accomplishment. We gave them inaccurate mirrors of reality. We forgot that our children are individuals with unique talents and gifts that they need to learn to explore on their own. They need to be free to make and learn from their own mistakes. They need to be encouraged and supported in their interests. Not our interests and wants. Not what our consumer-driven, dependency-oriented society wants.

As a result, our kids are even more unprepared for reality than we were. All we’ve done is create an entire generation of deluded people who can’t solve problems on their own. Like Julie.

Julie wrote a half of a novel and because she couldn’t sell it, she never finished the book. She quit because she didn’t get an “A” for participating. For the first time in her life, she faced the real world. She ended up with the message that if you try once and don’t succeed and your parents can’t fix it for you, give it up. This illustrates the basic problem with our society today: the emphasis on dependence on the system. The message that we can’t do anything ourselves. The emphasis on buying something rather than creating it.

We no longer celebrate long-term efforts. Everyone wants to get rich quick. Julie is an example of this. She didn’t go to cooking school. She didn’t work forty hours a week for twelve years writing a book. She spent one year cooking and working a dead end job and whining about it on her blog. And this is what got her a book and movie deal. Why? Because this “accomplishment” resonated with her audience. Many people who saw the film couldn’t see difference between Julie and Julia Child.

Consumption is being mistaken for accomplishment. Which is how a “celebutard” like Paris Hilton has become famous. If you’ve never accomplished something like writing a book, you have zero understanding of the grit, determination and astounding amount of energy and hours it takes. Julie had little appreciation for the work Julia Child did. All she did was whine at the end of the story about how Julia Child wouldn’t recognize HER accomplishment.

Unfortunately, our current culture is producing far more Julies than Julias. It was recently reported that in America, 70% of people are dissatisfied with their lives and jobs. This is because we have ignored the fundamentals of human fulfillment. There is only one way to happiness: discovering your unique gifts and working hard to turn those gifts into mastery, completion and accomplishment.

Because we’re socialized to be consumers, not creators or initiators, America is in decline. We are stuck in a parent/child paradigm with the underlying message that if we’re good girls and boys and follow all the rules and trust in the system, we’ll be taken care of until the day we die. As a result, we have vast numbers of unemployed people waiting for someone to come along and give them a job. They aren’t thinking about creating a new job for themselves or others. They’re waiting for someone to come along and save them. And as most of us have started to realize, no one is coming to our rescue. We’ve been sold a false bill of goods. We are being called upon to take care of ourselves outside the system and we haven’t been given the tools to do it. Which is making us all terrified and miserable.

The movie illustrated this concept perfectly. Julie was whiny, fearful, unhappy and had complete meltdowns during her “year of accomplishment.” Julia Child laughed and loved her way through her entire life. Sure she had setbacks, but she just got up, dusted herself off and got back to work again with a smile on her face and joy in her heart.

We have the power to change our way of thinking. Our country was founded and built by a nation of Julias. And we can be great again. Celebrate your unique gifts. Develop them and share them. Believe in yourself, be in your corner and work hard for what you want. Your happiness and the future of this country depends on it.

©2010, Janet Periat