A Phenomenon of Shrinking : Everything--Including Food--Is Getting Smaller and Smaller and . . .

When was the last time you worried about whether the chicken or the egg came first? Hardly anyone even thinks about such things anymore. We can all conjure up picture-book memories of a proud, full-feathered Mother Hen and her fluffy little chicks pecking away contentedly in Sunnybrook Farmyard and Poppa Rooster crowing like all get-out to greet the dawning of the new day. But how many kids of the computer age connect these images with the chicken nuggets that are overtaking hamburgers as the No. 1 fast-food choice of the nation? And as for philosophical questions concerning production and reproduction--they go largely unasked and unanswered.

Where Are the Nuggets?

Folks have stopped asking, “Where’s the Beef?� Instead, they are all out there crying, “Where’re the nuggets?� Even real cowboys are galloping into Roy Rogers ranches demanding them. Nuggets are everywhere you look; roosting beneath McDonald’s golden arches, nested in Swanson’s swell packages, getting themselves from freezer to microwave and a fast swallow, all in five minutes. Little golden nuggets are fast becoming our daily bread.

Of course, as you probably guessed, it’s all part of a giant conspiracy. Almost everything is getting smaller--becoming nuggetized, so to speak. This phenomenon can be traced very far back indeed--to the time of the handing down of the Ten Commandments, in fact, when we were given an entire blueprint for living in just 10 paragraphs.

Now we don’t have time for even this many words. If the nightly news programs were covering the event today, there would be an overhead shot of Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai and the story would be reported in brief: “An evangelist source,� Tom Brokaw or one of his rivals might say, “has handed down Ten Commandments, of which the two most important have to do with sex and coveting.�

We are all in a terrific hurry. We don’t have time for a lot of dawdling about and dealing with details. USA Today is in the forefront of this trend. This newspaper gives its nearly 5 million readers the Weather (in color), Wall Street, the Nation, the World, Money, Sports and Life itself in the time it takes to eat 10 morsels of chicken. This you must acknowledge to be a triumph of nuggetizing.

There are others in the game of abbreviation too. Workman, the publisher of the Silver Palate cookbooks, has issued a condensed version of 10 classic books on audio cassette, “Ten Classics in Ten Minutes.� Then there are the big talkers who, having recklessly promised thinner thighs in 30 minutes, have tempted hordes of others to try their hand at becoming One-Minute Managers, One-Minute Lovers, One-Minute Trial Lawyers and similar absurdities. Pretty soon we will be able to conduct our entire life in about an hour and a half--and if we stray onto a path leading to temptation, one of the preachers will offer to convert us to the true faith in the space of a commercial break, but without a money-back guarantee.

Four-Nugget Rating

Football fans will be able to tape each game on the VCR, and special markers on the tape will enable them to fast-forward it so that they can get to the goals without having to wade through all the preliminary thrashing around. The games themselves will be rated like restaurants, with three and four stars and so forth. For the fans, these stars will translate into ratings of a three- or four-chicken-nugget game; specially high-scoring games will carry warning messages to alert the viewer to lay in an entire bucket of nuggets.

A lot of other things are getting smaller too. Vegetables have been shrinking noticeably for some time, so now we are seeing one-bite cauliflowers, one-chew artichokes--and zucchini is getting so small it may soon disappear entirely and just be painted onto the plate as part of the pattern. I have heard tell that V-8 is trying to attract the booming diet market by cutting back to V-5 1/2.

Even the hamburger that has been the cornerstone of our civilization for so long is changing. Those smart guys in market research have discovered that what we really want is six or eight bite-sized hamburgers instead of the famous “two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun.� Kitchen appliances are miniaturizing at an alarming rate.

Already many of them have levitated from the counter and can be found crouching beneath the cabinets. Some declare that the very kitchen itself will soon be pronounced obsolete and that we will end up with only the microwave perched on top of the TV, so that we can input our popcorn while watching the VCR.

It is rumored that Sony will soon invent a variation on the Walkman. This will be a mini-freezer that will flash-chill our food as fast as the microwave now heats it. The new appliance will fit on our wrist and will be just large enough to contain a single super-premium ice cream bar. This will be marketed as a Cool Man.

No, I am not being serious. But on the other hand, don’t look for the vacuum cleaner in the closet. It’s now busting the dust on a small shelf in the bathroom cabinet.

There does seem to be an Alice in Wonderland “diminishing complex� abroad in our land and, like Alice, we shall soon need to start looking frantically for the antidote. We’ve all become used to mini-cars, mini-computers and mini-series; only the airlines are out of step. Once it took 10 hours to get from Chicago to Boston; now it sometimes takes even longer.

We are living in smaller and smaller places, and when we hunt for a new apartment we look for “1BR w/wrlpl, rvrvu, w2wcptg, fpl and xtrs.� All very well for a Type A person with a Ph.D who works for the CIA or G.E., living in ZIP code NY 10001--but how we long for the days when we knew naught for life in the fast track.

Life itself is conducted in brief encounters. Those searching for a new liaison will scan the Personal columns, using ESP to detect the perfect mate from among the hundreds who respond to “Male sks witty, cltrd fmle, mid 20s, 5’4, nonsmkr. Offr TLC. Box W544.�

Where will it all end, you ask? Well, I have found the answer. It will be life in a capsule and a meal in a bite. Look for the chicken noodle soup with the noodles inside the nugget, (reconstitute the broth). Dinner will be duets of vegetables inside the nugget to the accompaniment of sound digitized from the CD--and for those occasions when we want it all and want it all at once, we will seek a full symphony of flavor: eating a quail egg, inside a nugget enveloped in Godiva chocolate, at full gallop.