It's Friday, so why not write about something completly light and trivial?

Stagg chili, for example. Long ago, it came in a can. Then, one day, I wandered up and down the chili aisle, unable to find it, because they'd put it into a box. Mentally, I wasn't looking for a box of chili.

At first, I wasn't sure what to make of the box. But over time, it sold itself to me: it took less space than the can, you could open it without a can opener, and it probably kept the cost down. You could also close it up again and stick it in the fridge if you only used half of it.

So this week, I spent a long time wandering up and down the chili aisle looking for the boxes of Stagg chili, and not finding them -- because, I discovered, they were now selling it in cans again.

According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Hormel Foods has run up the white flag on the idea of packaging chili in resealable boxes. The Austin, Minn.-based food company thought consumers would like the box, because it could be microwaved. But it turns out they actually preferred chili in that old standby, the chili can.

Hormel's Stagg chili was first marketed in boxes in 2004, as the company tried to give the brand a national reach. Didn't work. Jeffrey Ettinger, Hormel's chief executive, said Wednesday it has "repositioned our Stagg chili line of products as a regional brand focusing on the western half of the United States, and we moved it back into the can."

Meanwhile, its popular Hormel Chili line is fully back in the can, too, after a couple of years where shoppers had a choice between a box and a can. The can won.

You could microwave the box? It never gave any hint of that and the foil lining seemed to indicate otherwise. Had I known, that would have been hugely convenient.

In other hugely-important food news, I am now forcibly 100% chewing gum free and probably will be for the forseeable future. Why? I hate the taste of aspartame (doesn't strike as "sweet" at all, but bizarrely chemical), and know enough about what it is and does that I won't willingly put it in my body.

It used to be that they made gum with this stuff called sugar. It was delicious. Then, brand after brand started to be made with "Nutrasweet" (aspartame). Finally, just recently, they came for my beloved Wrigley's Spearmint and Doublemint gum: last weekend, I noticed they now that the horrifying "New! Better taste!" which announced it had finally been poisoned like all the others.

Sigh.

Same goes with the the puddings: I used to enjoy the two-layer chocolate and fudge Jell-O puddings. But now almost all the labels announce: "Sugar Free! Low in Fat!" indicating they are now saturated with bizarre, strange-tasting, sickness-inducing chemicals. (Malitol does bizarre things to my digestive tract.) At least they left me with one -- one -- non-strange variety: chocolate. For a few more months, anyway.

Can't I just get some food anymore?

Look: I'm not some anti-GM anti-hormone organic-food-favoring extremist. I'm not allegic to any normal kind of naturally-occuring food. I just don't want to eat substances which (a) break down into formaldehyde, and/or (b) make me (and many others) sick. Is that so difficult?

Apparently, yes.

And don't even get me started about the complete disappearance of honey-roasted cashews. (The few brands which still claim to exist are actually plain cashews, sprayed with some kind of coating. Nobody I shared them with allowed that they were anything except disgusting. So it's not just me.)

Or the disappearance of lemonade from restaurants.

Or these horrifying unripe white slabs they insist on putting on every sandwhich I order because someone, somewhere, is obsessed with tomatoes, and these slices of ... what are they? surely this isn't tomato ... are supposed to represent or pay homage to that concept.

And let's also not get into the comtemporary dangers of spinach, lettuce, etc., all of which were caused by our collective obsession with stuffing antibiotics into everything which moves, or doesn't.

And, of course, we're doing it again with trichlosan, putting it needlessly into each bar of soap that is sold. (Soap was already bacteria-killing without it.) It's getting harder and harder to avoid those "Anti-Bacterial!" labels -- but it won't be so neat if bacteria develop resistance to it. Kiss those anti-bacterial surgical applications goodbye.

It is our desire to be safe which is killing us. It is our lazy, shallow desire to be "healthy" (note the quotes) and thin which is making us sick and fat. And it is our desire to have it all which is denying me even a stick of chewing gum.

It's no wonder I've come hate shopping: Every week it's some new horror.

On that note, and for your further amusement, here's The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.