Tuesday, September 16, 2008

At these prices, I should be skinny (Part 2)

Have you ever wondered why the size of some packaged foods are the size they are? Like why, if a serving size of Lay's Potato Chips is one ounce, do they package it at, like, 2.8 ounces and say on the bag that there are "about 3 servings" inside? I think it's because The Man doesn't want you to realize how many ways he's sticking it to ya. Here's what I mean:
  1. He knows most of us can't do math with a number like 2.8 in your head, and we'd round to the next number that's easiest to calculate in our heads, which, in this case, is 3.
  2. He knows that even Kate Moss wouldn't consider one ounce a serving, but that serving sizes are determined by a standard measurement that minimizes the negative impact of the facts. For example, one ounce of Lay's Classic Potato Chips has only 150 calories.  Doesn't sound that bad, right?
  3. He also knows that with these strange package sizes, you won't notice when he makes them incrementally smaller, because they were odd enough to not remember.
And now He's playing games with ice cream.

In denial about the cost of ice cream like I was with rice, I was holding out for my internal reference price.  But as you probably realized before I did, $7 can't buy two half-gallons of ice cream anymore.  So I sent the hubby into the store to do the dirty work: pay the going price for our half-gallon of ice cream.  This is what he came out with: 


For as long as I can remember, store-bought ice cream came in two pretty standard sizes: pint and half-gallon. Stuff in the pint were premium brands like Haagen Daz and Ben & Jerry's. Half-gallons ran the gamut from El Cheapo (not an actual brand name) to Dreyer's. Our latest "half-gallon tub" of Dreyer's came in a new size: 1.5 quart, also known as 3/4 of a 1/2 gallon.  Now, that's not all bad news.  It's cute and the smaller size fits perfectly in the top shelf of my freezer, standing up.  But, that's about it.

It was yummy and gooey, as expected, but it was also not satisfying.  The half-cup serving scooped too easily, melted and disappeared quickly and it totally did not feel like a serving at all.  It took three servings of what should've been taken care of with one, or two at the most.  Now, I'm not saying I'm above pigging out, because I'm not.  But that was not the case here.  Something was wrong with my ice cream.  I had to find out what it was.

The nutritional information was revealing.

There were only 150 calories in a 55 gram (g), 1/2 cup serving.  Sounds good from a dieter's point-of-view, but not from the POV of someone who needs a fix.  Since when did a non-diet ice cream have only 150 calories? I thought ice cream had something like 300 calories per half-cup serving.  So I did some sleuthing. Turns out, the last ice cream that I thoroughly enjoyed --  Haagen Daz's Caramel Cone -- has 320 calories in their 111 g, 1/2 cup serving.  That's more than twice as many calories and twice as much mass per 1/2 cup serving.

According to the National Dairy Council, "Federal standards require ice cream to contain a minimum of 10% milk fat (about 7 g of fat per 1/2 cup serving) and 20% total milk solids by weight. Some premium ice creams contain 16% milk fat." Dreyer's has 4 g of fat, which is low according to the Dairy Council's rough estimate, vs. Haagen Daz's 19 g.  So why the big difference? Milkfat and overrun. 

Calculating milkfat is beyond me, but let's just do some math to get an idea of percentage of fat by weight: Dreyer's 4 g/55 g = 7.3%, Haagen Daz 19 g/111 g = 17%. 

Overrun is a measure of how much air is incorporated into the ice cream.  The maximum amount of air allowed in ice cream is 100%, which would yield an ice cream that is half air. (Any more air is actually a crime!) If you weighed equal volumes of different ice creams, the lightest one would be the one with most air, and hence, the highest overrun. Other telltale signs of high overrun are grainy texture (as opposed to creamy) softness, and it melts fast. So it wasn't just PMS and my imagination.  There was actually something wrong with my ice cream!

To conclude this very unscientific analysis of ice cream and how The Man is sticking it to us yet again, let's compare satisfying amounts of the above-mentioned ice creams:
Ice Cream Satisfying Amount (SA) Calories at SA Fat at SA
Haagen Daz Caramel Cone 1/2 cup 320 19 g   
Dreyer's Loaded Choc Fudge Brownie
1-1/2 cup 450 12 g

The moral of the story: I ended up ingesting more calories eating a lower calorie ice cream than I would have getting the job done properly with a premium one... And that's why I'm not skinny even at $6.85 per 3/4 of a 1/2 gallon!

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