At a recent outing to a microbrew where we had been led to believe there would be empanadas for our culinary pleasures, we were sorely disappointed. Someone who shall remain unidentified (my daughter) got the date wrong, so we now faced starvation. It forced us to consume some tasty, flavored pretzels. We had to send my son-in-law out on a foraging expedition for Cheetos and other delectable delights. We faced desperate moments.

The pretzels came in a small plastic container, and while not empanadas, they served their purpose. The label on the package caught my eye. The nutrition information label said the package contained four servings. Each serving was fourteen pieces.

Fourteen pieces of small pretzels are considered a serving.

I’m not a big eater, but I could easily devour all four servings and move on to perhaps one or two more containers before I would even come close to being satiated. This led me to wonder, who determines a serving size?

Here’s a small sample of what some consider a serving.

M&Ms: Serving size twenty-two pieces!

Cheez-its: twenty-seven crackers!

Potato Chips: eleven chips!

If ever we needed proof of the existence of alien life forms, it is staring at us from every package of food we buy. They must be setting the serving sizes. No human being in history ever ate just eleven chips or twenty-seven Cheez-its.

EVER!

So I delved further into this mystery and found, lo-and-behold, that there is involvement by a shadowy government agency known by the acronym FDA (Food Deprivation Agency) sometimes operating in the open as the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA created the RACC.

 RACC stands for Recommended Amounts Customarily Consumed. And that’s just fancy phrasing that means “how much an individual should consume of that particular product in a single sitting.”

Are you kidding me? Have these people ever been out in the real world? If I am supposed to limit my intake of Cheez-its in a single sitting to twenty-seven crackers, why does it come in such a big box?

This whole serving size thing is a fraud. All it did was create jobs for more politically connected bureaucrats sitting around consuming unlimited servings of the world’s more delicious foods while writing rules limiting such intake for the rest of us.

But I am not standing, or sitting, for it anymore. I will eat as many Cheez-its or M&Ms or any other food of my choosing in any quantity I choose and serving size be damned!