I hereby nominate the caring and heretofore culpable folks down at Kraft Foods to be recipients of the dumbass of the month award.
Except despite what I just deleteriously labeled this award don't you just know that the guy that conjured this idea up just got a huge bonus and a corner window office. Yep.
It seems that the compunctious but highly compassionate folks at Kraft Foods are a bit concerned over the growing proportion of obese Americans and they want to do their part to help out. They've determined, following some particularly grueling cogitation, their own appropriate penitence.
It stands to reason that Americans are, well, fat because of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle concomitant with a poor diet. Clearly Kraft Foods can't motivate Americans to exercise more. Also off the table is producing healthier food products because that would be, uhm, expensive. Aha! We'll give the people less of our partially hydrogenated infused junk food for the same price and aren't we just so swell for it - you know - making Americans healthier?
Kraft declined to comment on any price changes...
Read, we're not lowering prices proportionately because if we were, that would have been the first utterance to come out of our mouths.
Dear readers, in the fine convoluted legal system that is American justice, a precedent has been largely adopted that states that one is culpable and therefore legally liable for doing bad things only when one knows one is doing bad things and fails to warn anybody. That being said, Kraft Foods is now legally off the hook as it were because, well, they tried didn't they?
One nifty side benefit brought about by all of Kraft's humanitarian do-goodership is, surprise, the simultaneous acquisition of oodles and oodles more money. That is the most regnant example of pure genius I've ever heard.
In fact, it's such a good idea, I predict that this trend will turn out to be very popular. Read, catch on like that wildfire out in New Mexico.
Since we've established the simple fact that Americans just plain eat too much, why don't we reduce the size of candy bars, bread loaves, canned goods ad infinitum? While we're at it let's make cigars and cigarettes(Marlboro for now) shorter too. Genius.
A simple concept to be sure and that's why it isn't surprising that the concept is not a new one.
One fine morning in 1983 a woman by the name of Jenny Craig bet herself that she could make herself oodles and oodles of money. She bought herself a set of bathroom scales from Sears, printed up some informative literature at Kinkos and placed the mother of all orders down at Acme-TV dinners specifying smaller portion sizes delivered in a box with a picture of an enticingly thin Jenny on the front to be subsequently fed to magnanimous though underfed "clients" together with a rousing atta-boy pat on the back. Genius.
Quite a few years ago oil companies began to produce unleaded gas as a way to "improve air quality" in the environment. So just how is unleaded gas produced you inquire? One starts with gas and then skips the part where the tetraethyllead is added. Then one raises the price of the resulting product. Presumably consumers should be forced to pay a premium for a cleaner environment. Oh, and I almost forgot, the oil companies make the aforementioned oodles and oodles more money.
I contend that is very difficult to legislate healthy lifestyles. Certainly I can think of some notable exceptions to that premise. For example, mandatory helmets for motorcycle riders. It doesn't take much of a leap to see the advantage of not banging ones noodle on the pavement. In many if not most other situations a quantitative measure of tangible benefit may not be as easy to ascertain. The two scenarios of business genius I outlined above provide examples in the much grayer area of perceived benefit. Only careful reflection will generally tip the favorable scales enough to motivate a given behavioral modification.
But at night I'd had these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zuchinni, fettucini or bulghar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat
Jimmy Buffet dreams of his cheeseburger in paradise. In real life when confronted with a "real" cheeseburger, rationalizations of "O.K. Maybe I die three minutes earlier." are hard to avoid - exchange of long term favorable health benefits for short term gratification.
That's precisely the reason that all hell's gonna break loose when Joe Average peels off the top bun only to find half of a meat patty. Further, anyone dumb enough to believe that the motivation for Kraft's portion reduction program is one of sliming down America should come visit me. I have a lot of good stuff for sale.
2:41:20 PM 
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