Stop eating entire “jumbo size“ bags of snacks that you impulsively bought, thanks to this household animal that can save you from yourself!

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The Issue:

In grocery stores, many snacks are sold in gigantic jumbo size packages. It can be hard to resist the compelling economic argument in favor of these snacks: you might get TEN TIMES as many potato chips for only twice the price.

Unfortunately, this means that you may later feel compelled to actually eat all of these snacks before they go stale, which can be a problem when you have 24,000 calories of almost-stale Oreos™ in your pantry. (This is substantially higher than the federally recommended number of Oreo-sourced calories, which is zero.)

Proposal:

In order to save shoppers from themselves, we can make a slight modification to the cabinets where the snacks are stored (Figure 1): we just need to cut a small hole in one side of the cabinet so that a snack-devouring animal can finish off any open snack containers.

Fig. 1: By simply cutting a hole (marked with “A”) in the cabinet where snacks are stored, we can allow household animals to enter and and eat any open snacks. These animals could be either existing pets or possibly new animals that have been procured specifically for snack-reduction purposes.

Conclusion:

It’s important that the animals being used for this purpose not be especially dexterous: we don’t want them opening up any unopened snack bags. So a raccoon would be a terrible choice, but a snake or bird would probably work well.

PROS: Should help with snack portion control, increasing national health.

CONS: In some sense, we’re just redirecting the negative health consequences of eating 900 Flamin’ Hot Cheetos™ onto some poor helpless animal… unless we can find an animal whose natural diet consists of Fritos™ and Hostess Cupcakes™? Does such an animal exist? We’ll need to inquire with zoologists.

Originally published 2026-08-17.