Ok yeah I get that. It's certainly a shame for Judith.

But companies come and go. They change recipes all the time. They do research to make everything as cheap as possible, you may never know it but I knew someone working at Unilever and the Mars bar for example constantly evolves, and let me tell you it's not because they want to give you the best Mars bar, it's just "we found a cheaper supplier for X" or "If we replace X by Y we save Z, and you don't really taste it". I like our Dutch tomatoes: Big, deep red and absolutly tasteless. Now they sell "taste tomatoes", I'm not kidding, they're much nicer. Last much longer on a shelve as well.

Many, many products have changed and disappeared over the decades. I don't see anything worth reporting in the piece, except for "putting attention on shrinkflation". Which is fine of course, but Judith should know better, we all should.

Judith should take this as a generational learning opportunity to provide her children and grandchildren with memories that don't depend on a corporation not altering their products.

I don't mill my flour of course, I do get it at a mill which does, because I bake a lot of bread and 5 kg bags are cheaper.

That said, if you take my pancake example, you literally replace the flour with more expensive pancake mix. Ok, fine, in some mizes there are dried eggs and milk protein or something, and you just need water. But you could even make pancakes with water instead of milk and they're fine.

With cookies it's similar, most baking is just different amounts of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, milk/water. Maybe some vanilla sugar here and there. It's really not that hard. Hey, and now you can start to experiment with banana and almond flour, and make it a bit less unhealthy/more nutritious. Or make pancakes with oats and banana, also nice and a lot more fiber. Treat yourself to a nice kitchen machine with the money you save and become much faster as well.

Learning some basic, proper cooking and baking should just be part of raising kids imo.

I know it sounds snobbish, but it's really not rocket science. Imo we are being scammed by all these companies selling products that are just as much effort, but more expensive and less healthy (usually more additives). They just prey on our lack of knowledge with their recipes on the packaging and their products conveniently put at eye-height, whereas basic stuff like flour is always at the lower shelves.

The other weird thing here is passing that recipe along at all. People are impressed with boxed mixes? It’s just weird to me.

It doesn’t even make sense. Buying the individual ingredients is more versatile. You spend less money, and have extra eggs, flour, etc left over that can be used for other recipes. And then it actually feels more homemade too.

Saving 20 seconds (measuring and prepping 3 ingredients for a “mix”) in order to end up with less tasty food is illogical.

*edit* ok never mind there is some reason to the madness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45246000

Mill my own flour? I'd call that the "Carl Sagan fallacy" for the lack of a better name. We don't have to "[first] invent the universe from scratch to make apple pie". Even if that is what he literally said.

You have been able to buy milled flour for thousands of years, and will probably be able to for as long as there is civilization.

Betty Crocker would be lucky to survive another hundred years.