Anyone who is trying vaguely to control their weight and still eats tasty, nasty processed foods — me, for instance — gets used to playing the game of ‘guess how many calories there are in the packet’. Today I bought the bag of sweets pictured above, and discovered a new difficulty level.
The rules of the guessing game go like this: Manufacturers print two calorie counts on the front of a typical packet – one for 100g, in small type, and one for ‘one typical serving’, in bigger type. The typical serving size, as far as I can tell, is determined by how large a fraction of the packet you can consume before passing some psychologically significant number of calories. With frozen pizzas, for example, the upper limit is somewhere around 600: so a goat’s-cheese and roasted vegetable pizza will consist of two 450-calorie servings (that’ll be a 900-calorie supper, then), while the same product range’s cheesy meat feast with extra meat and extra cheese will be three servings of 590 each (1,770; I probably shouldn’t).
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