The Kitchen

You know those those impossible-to-open plastic packages? Blister-packs I believe they are called, perhaps due to the condition in which they leave the hands of those foolhardy enough to attempt opening them.

Anyway, I was thinking that a great weight-loss strategy would be to stop packaging delicious foods, such as potato chips, in flimsy plastic bags, which provide little or no deterrent to being opened and gobbled down in a flash. Imagine if instead the potato chips came in blister-packs, and you needed to spend a good five minutes sweating over them with a pair of heavy scissors before you could get to the succulent victuals inside. And that's after first spending five minutes jogging around the house to find the scissors. Why, you'd burn through more calories right there than exist in the whole bag!

And imagine if this became so prevalent that different companies competed to see who could design the most impenetrable, hermetically-sealed package? Try our new Pringles, now with booby traps and porcupine quills! Consumer Reports would have to add a new metric, right up there with "taste" and "texture" called (perhaps) "impenetrability" or "hermeticity". I should trademark that.

So that's my proposal. Frito-Lay, the ball is in your court.