The incredible shrinking stuff. Not for girls, though.

You know what they say. Wagon Wheels aren't as big as they used to be.

'Ah well, that's what they say,' returns the argument,' But you were smaller then, weren't you?' 

As if that makes sense.  The logic behind that would appear that  the scale of my foodstuffs decreases as I incrementally increase.

Weetabix are still the same size, in my eyes, they still taste like loft insulation and still have the capacity to soak up milk at a rate of half a pint per twenty seconds.  In fact I've often wondered why the relevant authorities haven't considered a nationwide bank of Weetabix to be distributed in times of potential flooding, a bit like salting and gritting roads.  We would all sleep a little more soundly knowing that it could rain as much as it likes because we have crates of breakfast cereal on standby with the capacity to soak up phenomenal amounts of river water and discharge.  I mean, do I have to think of everything?

This may well be old news, but I do think it sad that we seem to accept the dwindling size of food items
without so much as as blink.

No stiffly worded letters to MPs, no blockades of supermarkets, no sit down protests outside the village hall.  Nothing. It seems we have just got used to it all and accept with crushed acceptance.

For example: Yorkie bars have been slimming down a damn sight faster than I have in recent years.  Once upon a time Yorkies seemed to be the size of yard brush heads.  Vast lumps of indigestible chocolate that could only be tackled efficiently with the spare toollkit in an Eddie Stobbart truck. Hence the whole trucking image thing 'Not for Girls...' stuff.



Three years ago they had shrunk from 68 grammes to 64.5 grammes.   Back in 2002 Yorkie bars were as big as 70 grammes, so the bars have decreased by around 8 per cent in just eight years. There's fewer chunks, I suspect, because something in my head says the word 'Yorkie' was spelled out before, chunk by chunk.

And Aeros - those lovely wispy, airy, minty, frothy morsels have lost ten per cent of their body weight in recent years.  Something I could do with, but as you may have gathered chocolate is one of my things and something I've jabbered on here endlessly about.

Don't get me started on Fry's Turkish Delight. Have you seen the size of that recently?  There are bigger dog biscuits. That hasn't shrunk, it's been savaged.

Of course, they not alone.  Other chocolate bars have suffered similarly as have various other items, food and non-food.

Birds Eye original beef burgers with onion: 16 pack, now 12, price increase; Walkers Cheese and Onion Crisps:  34.5 g now 32.5 g no increase; Finish All in One Powerball Dishwasher tablets: 28 now 26. On it goes; bacterial wipes, furniture polish, take your pick.

And the alternative is?  Well much higher prices I guess, but even so some prices have risen and packs have got smaller.

Not sure which of those I dislike more: rising prices or shrinking.

Would it be commercial suicide just to keep hiking prices up?  Would we just appreciate that rising costs have to be met somewhere by someone at some point? Do we notice less if our furniture polish has 42 available squirts and not 50?

I do think shrinking is generally less noticeable and somehow, we persuade ourselves that it's OK.  At least we're still getting our favourite product.

We've seen how awkward the pricing of something is just this week with George Osbourne's budget and his magnificent gesture in shaving a penny of a pint of beer.

If I'm going to save myself a tenner on a night out tonight at the Dog and Gusset, I'm going to have to shift enough beer to cause a head injury, let alone a hangover.

Five pence, I aint gonna notice George.  Thanks for the offer, appreciated and all that, but you may as well have kept the cash and spent it on useful services.  It looks like the NHS to start with, could do with whatever loose change you have, George. 

Oh dear.  There's no easy answer is there? None.  I may as well stop painting my protest placards because there really isn't a point.  We're just going to have to keep on keeping on putting up with shrinking because the bottom line is we can't keep bashing business. The companies that make all this stuff employ us too.  And whether you think it's more to do with profiteering and shareholders the fact remains that these companies can't soak up all costs forever or risk shedding jobs. There is a whiff of Catch-22 to all this.

As for Wagon Wheels, well the size of the biscuit varies across the world.  It's quite a bit smaller in Australia, for example.  But here, it's barely shrunk at all.  A slither.  So me getting bigger and the biscuit barely changing at all, is probably the truth of it.  Who'd have thought it.

Memories can play tricks, after all. Wish I couldn't remember the Milky Bar Kid.  What a clown.

Yorkshire puddings in a brownie pan? Whatever next.

I've been lurking in the kitchen again...smells really good from where I'm sat.  Honest.

One rasher of bacon and half a tomato. Now what..?

Christmas pudding.  At Easter...?   Ermm...

So anyway, I was having a rummage at the back of the fridge and guess what I found.  Christmas pudding. Checks calendar; end of January.

I try to keep rummaging to a bare minimum these days.  When I feel the urge to rummage, it always goes horribly wrong.  The freezer is my worst offence, apparently.  I tend to put stuff in the freezer where there is space.  This, as all sensible freezer users know, is a serious lapse of judgement and needs to stamped out vigorously.

The conversation usually moves around this area.

'You've put a loaf of bread in the middle draw!'
'Well, yes, because there was space there and the bread draw was full...'
'You can't put bread in the frozen veg draw, halfwit...'
'But as the bread draw was full I thought...'
'Well move things around in the bread draw then and make some space...!'
'But there is space in....'
'And there's a pack of mince with the frozen fruit...I mean...are you deliberately dense...'

You get the idea.  Logic is a troublesome thing when rummaging takes hold.  It's at least comparable with my inability to stack the dishwasher.  But I've droned on about that before on here so there's no point in raking over old ground. Anyway, I try to forget these things because you certainly can't rationalise why you can't (apparently...) put forks upside down in the cutlery box, thing in the dishwasher. Or knives. Or spoons. And why are there always less teaspoons to come out of the dishwasher than went in? The airing cupboard is another source of significant irritation, but I'm moving off the point.

Christmas pudding. In January.

So, moving a pack of cheese in the fridge, carefully to one side which was a risk in itself as the cheese was off limits and not housed in the bottom half of a plastic box reserved for cheese and cheese-based products on the top shelf, there sat a small black plastic bowl.  And in the bowl, a morsel of Christmas pud.

It's been there, languishing in the cool of the fridge for a month, hiding behind a marmalade jar mostly, but latterly, as we've just heard, a block of escaped cheese.  Now the reason why there's a bit of pud left when it was only a bite-sized thing in the first place, is because only my wife likes it in our house. She helps herself on Christmas Day after a drizzling a drizzle of rum from a bottle that was bought when Lesley Judd was still presenting Blue Peter at a guess.  She's the only one to like rum too, so the bottle is probably a hand-me-down.

I've tried to like Christmas pudding.  We've tried to be grown up about this - me and the pud - and air our differences, get hang-ups out in the open, talk it through sensibly, to no avail.  There's no meeting of minds.  I can't stand the damn thing, full stop.  And for reasons I can't explain, my wife never thinks of cracking open a tin of Ambrosia and enjoying the last remnants.  She seems programmed to only eat it within a narrow window, late December.

Easter will come and go and I bet you anything that fruity concoction will still be there, shuffling behind pots of jam to avoid attention.

OK.  Now what..?

Food waste. Why not, will not.

Anyway, this all begs the question of what to do with scraps and bits?  We heard just last week on TV news about the staggering millions of pounds worth of food  that never makes it to the plate either because we buy to much or because the supermarkets deem that carrot to be too ugly.

I do try to be careful as I am the food shopper in our house.  I try not to buy in excess and I hate throwing away odd bits of food just because it's an odd bit.  A chicken carcass never leaves the premises until it's released its chicken stock.  I've just had to throw about a third of a cucumber away because it was on the verge of composting.  Heartbreaking.  Seriously, I have a real problem with food waste.  I buy 'value' range of veg from supermarkets just to make a point.  I'm happy, delighted in fact, to buy a bag containing carrots of vastly different sizes and shapes.  As I'm chopping them up most of the time, who cares?  I buy mushrooms that just been plucked from their composty, soiley beds.  Why? Because I am also happy to buy oddly different sized mushrooms that I trim myself in a second or so, because I'm clever like that.

So.  Odds and bits.  I'm thinking of throwing this one open, as they say.  Let's attempt to get sense to apply here.  That day when you find two rashers of bacon and three mushrooms left or half a can of baked beans in the fridge.

What do you do?  You know what I'm talking about, we all find one tomato or slightly off-perfect pepper.

What do you do with the odds and bits that - I'm really sad to say - many people would simply dump in the bin to avoid the question?

Not 'mushroom' for this in your meal..?

What do you do..?

It seems a trivial matter this, but it's not really.  It matters a lot. When so many people struggle to put a healthy meal on the table or eat at all - please, I'm not trying to be overly melodramatic - then we really should all take a minute to think before we chuck.

If you'd like to comment here, that would be great.  I've not tried anything like this before, but I'm interested in what you have to say.  Or you could continue the chat instead on my Facebook page at mikegetscooking.

As for the Christmas pudding.  Well. It looks rather relaxed to me knowing that, unlike the hapless cucumber, it's the SAS of foodstuffs and can hang on in there surviving low temperatures without a second thought.

I could mention this to my wife, of course, but she'd accuse me of rummaging.

Let's not go there.  I think I'll go and reorganise the airing cupboard again.  Just for laughs.