Mourning the passage of the little ketchup packet

They are their own food group for college students, the ubiquitous mini-plastic packages of ketchup. Go to your refrigerator or your kitchen drawer and I'll bet at least a shiny penny that you have an odd half-dozen of them in there somewhere.
But alas, the little plastic ketchup packet has gone the way of the dodo bird and ice creepers.
H.J. Heinz Co. announced to the world their new design for the packet, spurred on by years of complaints. It features roughly triple the amount of the red stuff as a normal packet, one end that can be opened for squeezing the tomato on, and another end, well, you know ... for dipping.
The company claims to sell eleven million CASES of the old packets a year, and a rough count in the bottom of the fridge came up with results that seemed to back that stunning claim. That's a lot of red stuff to be floating around unused. Roughly a thousand-year supply.
With this new design, the glory days of ketchup pranks are behind us. Being a master in the practical jokes department, I just can't see how I could manage to slide one of the new larger hard-shelled containers into someone's back pocket. Gone also are the days of placing them under public toilet seats, or in a communal microwave. In a few short decades, when all the old packets are used up, I'll never again hear that satisfying "POP" of a packet exploding in the microwave.
Gone will be the days of decorating a roommate's front fender with them and mildly inquiring whether he hit a dog or a moose the previous night. Gone are the times when, in the midst of deep pocket change search for grocery money, you enjoyed dropping one of the packages contents into a package of Ramen, so its taste didn't so closely resemble its cellophane package. I've never tried it, but friends have told me that a few of the packets wrapped around a firecracker, then duct-taped up tight, often leaves quite an impressive splat in any white-painted room.
In the "Art of Drunken Cooking," one of several books I've not yet written but certainly lived, the little plastic blot of ketchup is a nutritional staple, right up there with peanut butter and cold pizza. How many times have you come home, taste buds benumbed by the application of beverages, and decided that perfect flavor could be found hidden away in a septic plastic packaging?
I once knew a girl who road the rails from one end of the country to the other, who claimed to have survived on nothing more to eat than those packets and other free schwag she could snag out of any convenience store condiment bin. According to her report, ketchup and onions on crackers made a great free roadside snack. She was skinny when I met her, and probably still is on that diet.
She left town a few years back, to continue her hobo journey across country, old time hobo style.
How will we as a country ever survive the re-design? Deep within the heart of the most obsessive "Don't Eat In My New Car" fanatic lies a hidden truth, a shiny collection of the squished and ageless tomato-based lumps, hidden away in the glove-box. Usually underneath a pile of unpaid parking tickets and a package of gum with one stick left. They ware a cultural icon of the fast convenience food age, and I'm sad to see them tossed onto the garbage truck of history.
Now if they decide to mess with my little packets of soy sauce, I'd say we have the reasonable makings of a revolution.

(Bob Higgins is a regular contributor to The Portland Daily Sun.)