Shrinking Calories in a bag of uWave Popcorn:

Today I weighed 221 pounds.

Some foods give you more than one list of food values. Dry Cereals, for example, will specify the value of eating them straight, or with milk. But I recently discovered that some Microwave Popcorn products tell a different story: that a portion contains fewer calories after it has been popped. There’s a mystery here, and perhaps a good story must be unveiled to explain it.

For example, one product drops from 130 to 100 calories after being microwaved in its sealed sack. I wonder if the “butter” sprayed on the popcorn drips to the bottom of the package and need not be counted among the final product. My wife suspects that the law requires the popcorn manufacturer to count all the popcorns before microwaving, but to leave an allowance for unpopped, inedible grains when the package is opened.

I wish there were other foods that lost calories when microwaved. Ice cream and pie, for example, not to mention General Tso’s Chicken.