Where I've read up on this: _Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us_ Bee Wilson's _Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee_ Susan Friedman's _Fresh: A Perishable History_
I started reading those after reading the silly simplistic crap pumped out by Michael Pollan. Two of those books expose our bad the food our grandmother's ate was. LOL
btw2, A REALLY great book about the way the "food science" and "healthy food" has been used, historically and currently, to provide the middle class with a way to distinguish themselves as middle class is Charlotte Biltekoff's _Eating Right In America: The Cultural politics of food and health_ https://www.dukeupress.edu/Eating-Right-in-America/
Anyway, because I don't shop for packaged foods much, I probably find it shockingly more noticeable when I do buy it.
One place where you see this happen is with 'fads'. Low fat food fads were widely embraced and pushed on us, to our ill health, because it cheaper to shove tons of process grain into something and fluff it with air. Voila: snackwells. People were told they were good for them, would help them lose weight. Instead, the stuff spikes blood sugar and, just because it's fat free, didn't mean you could eat all you wanted. But people were told that they could do just that. So they did: downed boxes of "diet" cookies because: no fat. Jane Brody said you could in the pages of the New York Times.
Low fat mayonnaise and butter? its whipped full of air. Same with low calorie ice cream. It's whipped up with air and thickeners like carrageenan and tapioca.
At my job, these skinny ass bastards I work with love eating chocolate. Bastards. They keep a big bowl of it which the 7 of them empty daily. I want to contribute so I run out and buy some candy. Whereupon I see the new fad is candy that is basically a bunch of crush nuts and rice grains, whipped up with air and puffed up, with chocolate and caramel drizzled over the top. So, you think you are buying a snickers or M*Ms or whatever. it's air puffed crushed nuts!
Maybe I'll go grocery shopping this weekend and take notes because I know I've seen more of this stuff but I've forgotten.
On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 3:41 PM, Shag Carpet Bomb <gracehinchcliff at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know of a book, but there has been a discussion of how this has
> been done in fashion. One other good book, related, is about the rise of
> throw away fashion. They create this shitties of clothing, make a virtue
> out of crap, sell $5 skirts that are basically threadbare tubes.The idea is
> that you want women in the store shopping every six weeks for new clothes,
> rather than the two or four times a year seasonal shopping we once did.
>
> you see cost cutting measures showing up and being sold as fashionable.
> some examples:
>
> - Strappy cut-out shirts. These are tee shirts that look nice, appear to
> have cut geometric and curvy shapes cut out of them to give interest to
> shirt. Actually done because the left over cut out can be used for things
> like pockets.
>
> - extremely thin material that is striated. The striated appearance is an
> illusion that makes the material seem less see-through
>
> - thinning out most shirt materials, especially for women
>
> - thinning of jeans: these are sold as "comfortable" and "broken in". I
> forget what my son was calling them. Anyway, they are just really thin
> denims.
>
> - exposed zippers. My husband calls some of this stuff "Frankenstein
> Fashion" because the exposed zipper looks like bad stitching for
> Frankenstein's monster. Point of it: you don't have to worry about covering
> up zippers - takes extra material, more care, more quality assurance
>
> -- clothing that doesn't have hems and rolls: no need for hemming work
>
> -- loosely stiched seams and buttons. You put something on, the buttons
> fly of or you find you are reinforcing a seam. Less thread, lighter weight
> thread, faster.
>
> -- Costume jewelry fashion - tassles on long necklaces - can reduce length
> of change, tassles can be made of lesser material. incorporating use of
> fabrics, string, etc to replace need to use even gold or silver plated
> nickel.
>
> -- death of flare and boot leg, rise of ankle hugging slacks.
>
> -- boxy shirt and dress fashions for women reduces need for darts or even
> making sleeves.
>
> *Carrol Cox* wrote:
>
> -
>
> ------------------------------
> Everyone knows of the famous shrinking Hershey Bar; that phenomenon goes
> back 70 years or so and was mostly harmless. It is not my concern here.
>
> But in some commodities quantity is identical with quality: a less bulky
> (thinner) sheet of toilet paper is qualitatively damaged. Ditto facial
> tissues.
>
> Mere redction in size can also damage saltines qualitatively. Current
> saltines (most, perhaps all, brands) are thinner and break up more easily.
> They are also smaller around, & that has some qualitative dimensiosn.
>
> But saltines, graham crackers, & Oreos have also disastrously degenerated
> in taste! Some years ago there was a blog on toilet paper degeneration with
> the slogan, They Caught Us With Our Pants Down. That will work as a general
> label for the matters discussed in this post. Lorna Doone shortbread has
> also lost flavor.
>
> Hydrox cookies, some 10 years older than Oreos, stopped production in 1998
> because everyone thought they were imitations of Oreos, though originally
> the opposite was the case. Be that as it may, in the last year at some
> point several _new_ 'oreos' appeared: they are the same shrunken size but
> they have the original flavor that disappeared from Oreos a year or so ago.
> Schnucks now has its own brand of 'oreos,' and they are satisfactory.
>
> The ersatz sheet/quilt now on all hotel beds may be explicable as labor
> saving; I was in a hotel room recently when the maid came, & it took her
> seconds to pull the bed covers together. But the other changes mentioned in
> this post seem to have some other motive. They must save _some_ pennies in
> materials????
>
> Economists really ought to study this widespread phenomenon. Some of the
> changes must save
>
> Is there any basis for the following speculation?. Financial firms dealing
> in billions probably pay attention to minute differences in the return on
> various securities. Would this make worthwhile the minute savings brought
> about by stupid hotel bed covers and flavorless oreos?
>
> Carrol
>
>