When dealing with food packaging it is always prudent to remember the wise words of Ford Prefect about junk food - when in a strange place, eat only the junk food, because then at least you know what you're eating (paraphrased a little, okay).

Be wary of food packaging. It will treat you like an idiot. For example, go to the nearest supermarket and pick up almost any packet of cereal. Look at the picture on the box. You should see a bowl as big as or bigger than the packet, filled with larger-than-life pieces of the cereal in question, possibly adorned with bits of fruit and almost certainly either floating in milk, partially submerged in milk or having milk poured upon it. If the cereal happens to be of the variety that is aggressively marketed to children it will probably also have at least one cartoon character dancing on, or jumping into (or out of) the cereal.

Now look for some small print either on the front or back or side of the package: "serving suggestion". Oh, so they suggest you use a mixing bowl and allow creatures of dubious cleanliness to actively contaminate your food with whatever filth may be on their shoes/feet/hooves/paws/claws/talons, not to mention that most of these characters don't wear pants (and we all know that animals don't wipe their bottoms after going to the toilet, unless of course they are a bear and a rabbit happens to be handy).

Now look for a little panel headed "nutrition information" or something similar. This is usually on the side of the packet. Under "serving size" they usually have the quantity of 30gm. Thirty grams? In a mixing bowl? (They also neglect to tell you that the cereal inside the box isn't as big as the cereal depicted on the box - technically they should be prosecuted for misleading advertising, but probably there's some loophole based on fudged statistics that says that 72% of all people who are likely to purchase cereal are legally blind in at least one eye.)

Moving right along... While you're in the supermarket (no, put the cereal back - you don't want to eat anything that's had bare bottoms on it), find the frozen foods section (that's somewhere that's very cold compared to the ambient temperature elsewhere in the supermarket). Look for a packet of mixed frozen vegetables or vegetable pieces, say corn/peas/capsicum/cauliflower/broccoli, which is a good mix by nutritional standards. The picture on the plastic bag may well be of the vegetables in a serving container of some kind, so you may well find the words "serving suggestion" somewhere on that packet as well, but if you look closely on the back of the packet you might also find the words "produce shown larger than actual size". By "produce" they mean the contents, of course.

So now you know that peas aren't three-quarters of an inch in diameter. You feel so much better now, don't you.

Even junk food has a problem with its packaging these days, at least in Australia (where this writer is based). Technically there should be no "nutrition" in junk food, so the "nutrition information" panel on junk food is somewhat superfluous, but the rules require it. A packet of potato chips (crisps if you are in the UK) should contain potatoes, salt, possibly some extra flavouring such as vinegar or onion, and little else. But the list of ingredients can be as long as a dozen! Why? Near the end of the list you'll find a bunch of numbers. These numbers have to be added to the food to stop it sticking together or falling apart, mutating into something too intelligent to be eaten or mutating into something that can run away before you have time to eat it, or all four.

Okaaay, so what can you do about this nasty little problem of food packaging? Nothing. Not a thing. Except maybe eat natural, unpackaged food, such as apples straight off the tree. Not that any self-respecting hitch-hiker would, of course.