I found them online at of all places, Staples.com. a box of 72 for 32.99. (comes out to 46 cents per snack!)
:smack: Yeah. Ignore the explanations and stick to your “you’re idiot moneywasters!” line.
[sarcasm]You’re one of those “bread-buyers” I bet. And I also bet you buy chickens that have already been killed, plucked, and cleaned. Man, what a waste of money. How can you live with yourself knowing that you’ll be homeless soon?![/sarcasm]
(I don’t buy 100-calorie packs, but I think it’s possible to understand that there are intelligent reasons why someone would.)
Speaking as someone who makes bread as a hobby, it’s a humongous pain in the ass and not really cheaper than buying pre-made loaves, either in ingredients or time spent.
Granted, but some people (not necessarily that poster) seem to decry convenience foods merely because they’re packaged in a more convenient form than they deem appropriate, and all who buy them are tools of the corporations. I should have stuck with the chicken argument in this particular case.
That’s because you’re an idiot for not growing your own grain and doing everything REALLY from scratch!
-Joe
Oh, I totally get your point and agree completely. I just saw the “make your own bread” meme appear a couple of times and figured I’d chime in.
I’ll have you know that I carry the 1’s and 0’s to the SDMB server by hand every time I post.
Although the arguments against the 100-calorie packs on the basis of price per ounce are valid my real objection to them is the massive overpackaging. I really hate food that’s wrapped eleventy different ways–to my mind, if the packaging outweighs the food it’s just plain wrong. If those same little Oreos were available in bulk I could see buying a pound (using one plastic bag for the entire purchase) and then packing them into a ziplock (bring it home for reuse, it’s just got a bit of cookie crumb in it!) for lunch or a snack. If you know that twenty of them is a 100 calorie snack, go get twenty out of the bag and put them in a little bowl when at home to snack on.
I’m okay with overpaying for convenience because that impacts nobody but the buyer and is therefore nothing but a personal choice. I’m not okay with overpackaging for convenience, becaust that impacts everybody.
I think there are intelligent reasons, too! But “my life is too busy not to” is what I call bullshit on. Your life is too busy to NOT waste your money? It’s like someone who bought the “taco kit” in a money-saving-while grocery-shopping thread a while back. What, that saves you the time of having to go into another aisle to buy a thing of salsa? Give me a break…
That was a little different. He was arguing that grocery shopping was not cheaper than eating out and using the taco kit as an example of that.
I am not in the least claiming that I can’t snack cheaper than a 100 calorie pack of oreos, I’m just saying that it’s my money and I’ll ‘waste’ it any way I choose.
Well now I just feel bad for getting a small popcorn at the movie theatre when I could have gotten an extra large for 50 cents more.
Seriously, though, people already pay more for convenience and diet foods. If it helps them snack less and eat healthier, who cares?
That’s the whole point. This isn’t for people who eat a healthy amount, it’s for people who need to take advantage of those subconscious heuristics in order to mindlessly lose weight. Individual packaging plays upon four of these heuristics:
First, the extra packaging creates yet another barrier to eating that needs to be overcome and gives an extra minute of pause. Do I need to eat this? That extra second to consider if you really want Oreos or if you’re just eating without thinking makes a huge difference in the number of calories you consume.
Second, we tend to assume that if we receive a package of something then it is the recommended amount to eat. If two people receive food–one smaller portions in a small package, and the other larger portions in a larger package–they will both eat the entire contents of the package yet report feeling equally full.
Third, your eyes are just as important as your stomach in knowing how much to eat. When you eat directly from the package, then there are no visual cues to remind you of how much you ate. There are no discarded chicken bones, no empty bottles, so you will eat more.
Fourth, if you buy in bulk, you eat in bulk. Having large quantities of certain foods makes you more aware (salient is the technical word) of them and you are more likely to eat them and eat more of them.
I can find a published article to support all of these claims if you’re skeptical, but go back and browse the cites I listed earlier (most available here).
I cannot stress enough the importance of reading Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating. He is an absolute titan in the field of food psychology, and is extremely effective at taking away the natural arrogance nearly everyone has that “well, I don’t fall for that.”
That’s all well and good, but kindly take into account that there are other factors for obesity, including a link between chemicals used in plastic packaging. Check out this article, which is also referenced in this thread because of some of the other alarming news it references.
My opposition to overpackaging is valid not only in terms of what it does to the environment, but also in terms of what it’s doing to individual people. When you consider that the handy dandy little convenience pack you snarf down with your bottled water might actually be CONTRIBUTING to making your big fat ass even bigger than it already is, it might be time to step away from the bullshit pop psychology and focus on getting better habits in place.
You want a “barrier to eating?” How about this one–before you’re allowed to eat anything that isn’t a carefully planned and portioned meal you first have to walk around the block. If you still feel like having your twenty itty bitty cookies after that, fine, but if you want a second helping it’s around the block again. Try it, it works for weight loss and for quitting cigarettes as well. How about placing all the snack foods in a locked shed out in the yard? Still feel like going out in the rain just to have a cookie?
If someone is so far gone in denial that a one pound bag of cookies is considered to be one serving just because it’s all in one bag, that person is more in need of therapy than weight loss, in my opinion.
I don’t doubt any of your claims, I just reject the mindset that says we have to fucking cater to people who can’t or won’t think for themselves. It’s this kind of mindless, endless babyhood that’s driving so many of the environmental crises we’re facing and it has to stop somewhere. “Waaah, it’s too HARD to stop eating cookies, somebody ELSE has to tell me how many I can have!” “Waaah, it’s too HARD to count out how many cookies they said I can have, somebody ELSE has to put it into a tiny little plastic bag FOR me!” “Waaah, it’s too HARD to recycle, somebody ELSE has to do it for me!” “Waaah, I LIKE having individual servings of FUCKING WATER in a conveeeenient plastic bottle I can throw away, it’s too HARD to refill a bottle and I have to WASH it too!” “Waaah, it’s too HARD to plan my errands so I don’t have to make multiple trips and it’s REALLY too hard to coordinate with someone else to double up on a trip to the same place!” “Waaah, NOTHING is my responsibility, NOTHING is my fault, SOMEBODY ELSE has to take the blame for everything that’s wrong with my life!”
Yeah, we’re all free to do whatever we want, I got that. However, being so fucking free has led to a nation of fat, whining, overprivileged, entitled, pissy little bitches who apparently need to be handheld through even the most basic of tasks–figuring out how much food is enough. I’m fucking sick of it, and I’m saying this as someone who’s fighting the good fight against my own lard ass. It’s also led to oil crises, air pollution, hugely overstuffed landfills, toxic waste choking the oceans and global warming. Yes, YOUR individual decisions DO make a difference and I don’t really give a shit that Steve down the block doesn’t do his part–worry about what YOU are doing because Steve is NOT your blanket excuse to do whatever feel like doing.
Take some fucking responsibility for learning that a whole bag of cookies is NOT an appropriate serving, or just deal with being a gigantic fatass all your life–stop expecting somebody ELSE to babysit you. Because the fucking corporations will fall all over themselves to leap in and do just that, but the result will be that your entire ecosystem will suffer just so you can have your perfectly proportioned bag o’crap. Nice. Go explain it to your kids, if you can even have any after the byproducts of plastics wreak havoc with your reproductive system.
Geez, dude. Nobody here knew you had a point to make about the environmental impact of this stuff. You’ve made a fairly interesting argument here, one that I am sure is not on the radar of almost anyone, and one that seems worth thinking about. But couching your argument in these angry, controversial tones is not doing the argument any service at all. Nobody here knew that you were angry, not about people eating too much and harming themselves, but rather about the effects of these kinds of packaging practices on the environment. It would have been best for you to mention this up front if you were actually interested in offering this consideration up in a way that invites people to listen to your point.
Also, it’s seems fairly ignorant to call technical articles by food scientists and psycholgists “batship pop psychology.” Your seeming fairly ignorant also does no good service to your argument.
-FrL-
Hey, I thought that this part of my original post made it pretty clear that my objection was environmental:
I’m at a loss how to misconstrue “impacts everybody” as anything other than a global objection on environmental grounds. As I clearly stated, I really don’t care about personal choices–because they’re personal.
What I objected to was the post by Forum Bot which, to my mind, defended the whole overpackaging issue by saying it’s somehow NECESSARY in order to prevent overweight overeaters from themselves. This takes the whole issue outside of the personal (“I don’t know how to employ portion control”) and puts it into a public level (“Cookies must be packaged in tiny portion sizes by the manufacturers so I can control my portions.”) and therefore makes the personal choice public and subject to comment and refutation.
The fact that there’s a link between certain chemicals in plastics (BPAs) which are linked to obesity and diabetes makes the overpackaging problem even more pressing–by buying and consuming individually plastic packaged portions of cookies fat people are possibly making themselves MORE FAT and increasing the likelihood that their children will be fat. The irony is not only thick on the ground here, to me it’s absolutely maddening. To just wave away the BPA-obesity/diabetes link because it’s “more important” to have perfectly proportioned snack packages is disingenous in the extreme and to my mind, anyway, fits quite neatly into the mindset that all environmental problems are the purview of “somebody else” along with all personal responsibilty for one’s own body economy.
I’m very sorry that people “believe” that any package that they see is “one portion.” I’m also very sorry that people believe that there’s no link between the activities of the human race and global warming. I’m very sorry that people believe that “oh well, nothing can be done, it’s too late anyway.” I’m very sorry that people believe that god is going to come down on a flaming pie and make everything all better for them. I’m very sorry that people believe it’s really okay to drive 15,000 miles per year in a gigantic SUV that gets 10 miles to the gallon instead of a sedan that gets 30 because twice a year they buy five sheets of 4x8 OSB from Home Despot and therefore they “really need” that huge a vehicle. I’m very sorry about all these things, mostly because they’re all things which I think can be handily classified as “bullshit.” People “believe” these things because they’re easy and comforting and justify bad behavior. Other people let people’s bullshit beliefs slide without comment or challenge because “hey, everybody’s entitled to their opinion,” or they want to “be nice,” or “I can’t change their mind.” Quite often I’m one of those people myself (which bothers me sometimes) but today I’m not staying in MY comfort zone and letting it go past.
Yeah, I ranted a bit. It’s the Pit and this stuff really upsets me, but dammit sometimes things just have to be said–and the microcosm of “it’s just a convenience pack of cookies” is semantically equal to the macrocosm of “holy shit, this is fucking serious out here!” I realize that the medium can damage the message, but all I’m seeing in here is a rabid defense of a really stupid and damaging marketing ploy which is part of a whole series of bad decisions we let corporations get away with every day. I figure if even ONE person walks away going “holy shit, those 100 calorie packs really are fucking obnoxious” and refuses to buy into the whole business it’s worth it.
Even if nobody does so, at least in the karmic balance of the universe I said something which I think badly needs to be said. If every single citizen of the US were to employ their own human energy to some task they’re now using machinery or “somebody else” to take care of, there’d be fewer fat asses and more benefit to the planet. Anybody care to argue that point?
I’m not quite sure I’d say it’s a “fact.” It’s something that some scientists believe. Some studies show a linkage. But many times these studies cannot be replicated, so I’d hold off a few years until we have more data to say that this is a “fact.” And the fact that your link was a “Best Life” magazine does little to support your notion that this is somehow a hard and fast scientific truth.
Well, we may be fitter and the planet may be clearer, but if your idea was widespread our lives would be much worse. Using machines to eliminate labor frees us up to do much more productive work. Sure, people were a lot thinner in, say, 50 B.C. when there were far fewer machines, but their lives sucked immensely more. Anybody (outside of the Unabomber) care to argue that point?
Okay, you don’t like that cite? How about this one? Check out the link to the articles–I figure it ought to take you a couple days at least to wade through some of the results of Dr. vom Saal’s biphenol research studies. Are you sure you have a “few years” to waste? How about your kids? Are you absolutely certain you’re going to have grandchildren?
As for your second point, I respectfully submit that at no time have I advocated the complete abandonment of all machinery to do work. I also respectfully submit that anybody who is sitting on their ass eating so many cookies that they’re woefully overweight is not doing “more productive work.” I don’t think there are too many people, yourself included, who absolutely cannot find any instances of activities in which your own human effort can be substituted for those using machinery or methods which have an environmental impact. As a matter of fact, I respectfully submit that anyone who makes this claim is spouting some of my aforementioned “bullshit.”
The major problem with “civilized” people is, in my opinion, a profound lack of balance. Balance in food intake to energy expenditure. Balance in work versus private life. Balance is being mindful of the planet and doing what we can versus either mindlessly consuming and wasting OR becoming so ridiculously ecoconscious that flush toilets become the enemy. BALANCE.
A fabulous way to determine if you have a lack of balance in your life is how much justification and rationalization you have to indulge in to make it okay to do what you do.
Spouse says you work too much and neglect the family? “But I’m doing it ALL FOR YOU, you should THANK me! Besides, if I don’t I’ll get fired. It’s just one soccer game/school play/graduation/insert activity here, they’ll get over it!” See? Bullshit. Overworkers overwork because they like it better than the alternative.
“I’m fat because of genetics/big bones/glandular issues/I can’t help myself.” Bullshit. You’re fat because your caloric intake exceeds your energy expenditure. If you’re on a measured 2500/2000 (M/F) calorie per day diet and you exercise for at least 30 minutes at least 3 times per week and you are not gaining weight, you are not fat, you are at the normal weight for you.
“I can’t exercise because of my bad knee/ruptured disc/hypoglycemia/insert malady here!” Bullshit. You don’t WANT to exercise, simple as that. There is exercise even 500 pounders can do–go swimming!
“There’s no PROOF of [insert health issue or environmental issue here] so I shouldn’t have to do anything about it!” Bullshit. To some people there will NEVER be enough proof. Some people don’t think the jury’s in on whether or not GRAVITY works–me, I’m not jumping off any bridges anytime soon just because somebody thinks there isn’t “enough proof.”
The sensible person says “Hmmm, if people who went to all the trouble of learning things I can’t be arsed to learn are telling me THEY’RE worried about something perhaps that’s something I ought to pay attention to.” Do I have plastics in my house? Absolutely. However I do NOT buy bottled water or pop in bottles, I reuse the same plastic jug I’ve had for ten years to make my iced tea in. I avoid overpackaged products and consciously choose those packaged in recyclable materials over those that aren’t. I recycle, especially since the county gives me those handy dandy bins and all I have to do is segregate stuff. I don’t throw used batteries or light bulbs in the trash, and I use rechargable batteries wherever possible. I compost my yard debris and put it in my garden instead of sending it to a landfill. I make sensible choices, and wherever possible I use my own ass to do work instead of using a machine to do it for me.
I ride a bike for errands sometimes, or walk. I till my garden by hand rather than using a rototiller. I use a bow saw to trim my trees rather than a chainsaw. I use manual hedge clippers instead of gas powered. I use a manual edger instead of the weed whacker. I most certainly do NOT use a logical fallacy to ridicule others who are also doing their small part to make my life better and more sustainable, and I admire those who can make greater sacrifices than I to that end. Personally, I reserve my scorn and pity for those who waste more energy fighting against doing the right thing than they’d EVER use just doing it in the first place.
But that’s just me.
How does this statement
jive with this one?
Those are all pretty good ones. I think you believe more of this “bullshit pop psychology” than you want us to think. What I fail to understand is, in the context of weight loss, why any of these should be counter-arguments to the studies that show smaller, individually wrapped snack packs result in lower total calorie consumption.
Hey, what if people bagged their snacks and walked? Wouldn’t that be even better?
You misunderstand. The ultimate point is that the amount we eat is directly proportional to the size of the container we get it from. An open pack of Oreos is the bigger bowl. This is true of all people, regardless of BMI. If you think this is indicative of mental illness, well, you’re just plain nuts (or dumb).
These heuristics are prevalent in everyone. Sorry, buddy, but you’re not some Chuck Norris style Übermensch capable of inflicting your conscious will over every aspect of your unconscious thought processes. You fall for the same tricks we all do. The only difference between you and the people who buy the small packs is they’ve assessed themselves realistically and shifted their behavior accordingly, while YOU CAPITALIZE random words on THE INTERNET!!!111 about how DUMB people are.
“It’s not all the food I’m eating that’s making me fat, it’s the plastic!” TAKE some damn RESPONSIBILITY people!!! I’m not being serious about that point, by the way. That was just an exercise in demonstrating your specious arguments contradict each other.
If there is a serious problem with the packaging of our foods, it needs to be investigated and federal food packaging regulations should be adjusted accordingly. But you surely can’t be stupid enough to believe avoiding plastic will have a greater net reduction in weight than lower caloric intake.
I always considered changing your eating habits to be taking responsible, proactive steps in your weight control. Hiring a personal trainer to monitor your activity in the gym doesn’t strike me as particularly stupid or lazy, but it certainly means you’re taking advantage of your factors other than your own sheer iron will.
Your environmental claims are perfectly understandable, and I even think you’re probably right. But raving and screaming like a lunatic on the internet isn’t really the best way to get people on your side.
Whether the personal benefits of losing weight is fairly balanced against the increased amount of plastics is completely irrelevant to what everyone else has been talking about.
Just me speaking, but I thought you were worried that your precious gigantic boxes of food were going to be taken away as everyone moved to 100 calorie packs. Upon seeing that you were talking about environmental issues, yeah, that’s a lot more reasonable. I totally see it now. There was a miscommunication, now there isn’t. Take a deep breath, it’s going to be OK.
I have no idea where you got that from. People use different strategies to change their eating habits; I just defended this one as being pretty effective. I don’t think I implied anywhere that individually wrapping your snacks is the lone, single way to lose weight. That’s silly.
Not necessarily. The psychology works regardless of how you change your container sizes. I buy bulk boxes and individually bag appropriate portion sizes. The effect is the same, and doesn’t change your spending options at the store one iota. Get over yourself.
Oh, they don’t believe it. As I said earlier, the studies are always followed by a questionnaire, in which people are asked if the hidden persuaders changed how much the eat. Overwhelmingly people think no way, that’s stupid exactly the way you think right now. But we know for a fact their behavior says otherwise. Sorry, chump. You’re not immune. You fall for the same bullshit we all do.
sings One of these things is not like the other one…
Wow, bit of an alarmist, aren’t we? News flash: every week we find something else that causes cancer. Hell, grapes probably cause cancer in some way. We can’t just start tossing out useful, vital products on just preliminary research. If you want to avoid plastic, more power to you. Maybe you’ll find a nice girl like yourself and you’ll be the only couple capable of reproducing. Wouldn’t that be cool?
But don’t judge us for not jumping on your ‘plastic is evil’ bandwagon because some researcher thinks he found a link.
What does this have to do with 100 calorie containers? You should start your own pit thread if you want to express these thoughts.
Ooh, you get a gold star.
Man, there are so many avatars of virtue in this thread I am truly humbled.
-Joe
I fail to see how not wanting to spend time counting cookies into plastic baggies is a symptom of laziness, and I’m a pretty big expert on laziness.
I’m “stupefyingly lazy” because I sleep in in the morning instead of getting up and going to the gym like I know I should. I’m “stupefyingly lazy” because I get in my car and drive to the strip mall around the corner for lunch, when I can walk there in less than 15 minutes. I’m “stupefyingly lazy” because I don’t shovel my driveway if there’s a more than 15% chance it’ll all melt in the next week or so. I’m definitely lazy, and not particularly proud of it.
But because I can’t be bothered to do tedious tasks that I find unpleasant, and instead pay what are to me small amounts of money in order to have other people do them instead? That doesn’t even factor into the calculation of laze. I do that sort of thing all the time.
I have a good job. I earn a reasonable salary. I pay little in rent. As a result of all of that, I have a great deal of freedom to choose what I do with my non-work time and my excess income. I choose to spend some of my money on fun activities like my straight dope membership, concert tickets and dinners out. I choose to spend some of my money on avoiding activities I don’t like or am not good at, like fixing my car, washing salad greens, and precisely portioning out my caloric intake. Those two things are the same sort of decision – using money to buy yourself more good times and less bad/boring/annoying times. It’s why I work in the first place.
There’s an interesting argument in the environmental objection to 100 calorie packs (though it’s kind of lost in the idea that we could just put the cookies in plastic baggies ourselves, since, duh, that would just make the problem worse), but the economic/laziness objections seem pointless to me. The same argument can be made every step of the way from growing your own through buying whole foods, buying processed foods like canned goods all the way through buying pre-made frozen dinners or prepared deli meals. There’s a trade off at every step between spending time and effort and spending money, and everyone has to look at their own financial picture, work/life balance and factors related to value, product quality and price and decide where the appropriate trade off lies for them.
I don’t buy 100 calorie packs of OREOs, though that’s more because I regard OREOs as an abomination unto the name of cookie, and not because I morally object to 100 calorie packs. I do like freshly baked cookies, though, and I sometimes buy them from the bakery in packs of 12, even though I know that realistically, I could make 10 dozen cookies for the prize of that dozen.
When I decide to buy cookies instead of make them, I’m weighing the inconvenience of making sure I have all the ingredients on hand, the likelihood that I’ll end up with more than a dozen cookies, which I will then eat, and the fact that I hate doing dishes against the fact that $5.00 is a large markup on a cup of flour and a cup of oatmeal and half a stick of butter, and that my cookies are actually better than Dominion’s, and that I do like to bake cookies. Sometimes I bake cookies, sometimes I buy them, and either of those decisions can be the right one depending on circumstance.
SmartAleq, I understand your concerns about individual serving size packaging as compared to big bulk (12 or more ounces) bags of 'tater chips. But here’s what I’m not grokking: how is a 100 Calorie bag any worse than a Big Grab bag(which has 2-3 servings in it that are nearly always consumed at one sitting)? If anything, it’s smaller and therefore less plastic used and released into the wild.