Saw the other day in Safeway a really, really stupid ad slogan:

Half the sugar of yogurt

in big letters at the top of a sign advertising something called Knudsen Cottage Doubles, which are packages of cottage cheese plus a syrupy looking fruit topping.

Huh? Yogurt has maybe 2g to 3g of sugar per serving, doesn’t it? And according to the label this stuff has 14g. Not half the sugar. About four or five times the sugar.

If you get very close to the sign, though, you can see a tiny asterisk after the slogan, and in tiny words near the bottom of the sign it says

*When compared to 8 oz. of the leading sweetened yogurt

In order words, half the sugar of yogurt after we’ve added a bunch of sugar to it.

Besides, yogurt is naturally a bit sour, and until you get used to the taste it can be nice to add a little honey or jam to it (though given the popular American diet, the leading yogurt is probably the sugariest of them all — or more likely the high fructose corn syrupiest). But who needs to sweeten their cottage cheese? Who wants to sweeten their cottage cheese? We’re not talking about one of those live-culture cottage cheeses you get in the organic food stores that are as sour as yogurt, we’re talking about commonplace mainstream cottage cheese. It’s not like you need half a cup of ice cream sundae topping to make that palatable.