Serving Size

Having posted earlier today, in part about the silly serving size of a Big Kahuna Giant, a few minutes ago, as I started to get hungry and think about the careful preparation of the second two “servings” of my Big Kahuna, I wandered into the kitchen to turn on the oven to pre-heat it to bake some frozen French fries (no oil, healthy, don’t argue with me).

I started looking at the nutrition labels of stuff.

I like Lay’s Stax. They are a better version of Pringles. Serving size according to the plastic container is 13 “crisps.” First, why aren’t they a chip? Well, I suppose that is actually truthful as I think they make a soup of the potatoes and form them into “crisps.” Anyway, 13 crisps, allowing for the broken ones, are about an inch thick. A serving?

OK, let’s go healthy. You ever buy one of those little “individual” cans of vegetables? I do. My spring peas, just examined, are TWO “approximate” servings, even though the can is labeled as individual. This is healthy stuff. The whole can is 8.5 ounces. I'm only supposed to eat approximately half of it?

Just so you know, I’m not a big guy. I’m not a big eater. Rick, Bill, Jay, Hedy, tell them.

Some years back when I was traveling a lot, I was on a Delta jet from Atlanta to Philly at just about sunset (at 30,000 feet). It was quite pretty. Anyway, I was bored. My laptop was out so I started writing about what I was seeing. (Before there were blogs, I used to "blog" Emails to friends from hotel rooms.) The sunset, the turkey sandwich that Delta used to serve on every flight before it got out of the turkey farm business (Didn’t know that did you! Delta didn’t used to be an airline. From the evidence, there were a couple of guys back in the way back when that had a bunch of turkey farms. They couldn’t sell all the birds, so they started an airline, Delta, so they could get rid of the excess birds by way of dry sandwiches. I think their last name was Biscotti.)

Ahem! So one of the things I was looking at on the flight was the empty water bottle from my complimentary “meal.” On the nutritional label it recited that it had no calories, no carbs, no saturated or other fats, cholesteral, sodium or protein. Serving size? “Approximately one bottle.”

(This downsizing of serving size actually makes sense for one product, though it isn’t food. Have you noticed that paper towels are being perforated at about 50 or 60% of what they used to be? For many jobs, makes for the perfect size.)

OK, to wrap this up, want to know how many fries you get in a serving? Three ounces, or “about 18 pieces.” Does that count the bits that constitute about 10% of what you shake out of the bag? I throw those away. My guess, I had about 5 ounces, pig that I am.

Finally, I am adding this after initially posting this. You get one, count it, one, Archway oatmeal raisin cookie in a serving. Right. I'm not going to look at the serving size of the milk I'm going to drink with my four servings of cookie.