(OT) Has anyone here been cutting cheese lately?

[Guest guest]

This has nothing to do with passing gas, by the way, ...

I came upon a weird revelation today, when I was cutting cheese to grate for our homemade tacos. A few days ago, I tried to slice a rather thin slab of mozzarella for a sandwich for one of my sons (the one who runs off to work without taking lunch along). The small slices of cheese kept sticking to my knife, and I had to carefully peel each on off to keep it from breaking apart. The same thing happened this morning when I was making melted cheese sandwiches for some of my kids for breakfast, and again tonight, when I took out a different slab of cheese to shred for our tacos.

Before you all assume that we eat way too much cheese, we don't. My encounter with cheese recently happened because I happened to be home long enough to look at and deal with what's in our fridge. Anyway, I dug all of our cheese bars out of the fridge, and found that what we used to think were 650 g bars, are now 500 g bars of cheese, even though they are selling at much higher prices nowadays than the 650 g bars did several years ago. My husband and I usually wait until the bigger bars go on sale before we buy them, but still the savings are less if the bars are now smaller.

I wouldn't have even noticed this difference, had it not been for the annoyance of trying to peel these narrow cheese slices from my knife. I knew that these cheese slabs used to be wider or higher, and easier to cut. The other thing that caught my attention, was that there was too much empty plastic baggage on the sides of the cheese bars.

Some years ago, at one of our No Frills stores, a savvy clerk told us to avoid cheese bars with any air in the packaging, as they tend to go bad faster. Now, all of a sudden, all of our larger cheese bars have lots of empty space at both ends. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that some of these manufacturers have changed their product sizes without changing the size of the packaging, yet, and are trying to run this under the radar of their customers. I wonder what else they are trying to scam us with?