The Tin Lizard

Downsizing The Big Gulp In The Big Apple

It wasn't at all shocking to hear yesterday morning that New York Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to ban giant-sized (32-ounce) servings of soft drinks was halted in court.  

Well, maybe a little bit surprising -- the judge ruled the new law didn't treat all parties equally, so the shock was to learn that the city had not sought to ban the oversized portions in all types of stores, or to ban large sizes of all caloric drinks. 

The question of whether it's legal to try to regulate the size of portions at all has been left unanswered.  Personally, I think Bloomberg's effort can't stand up to a challenge on that issue.  It may be a health concern, as the Mayor claims, but to what lengths can we go to try to save people from their own bad judgment?  And can't they just buy a larger number of smaller drinks and get around the law that way?

I'm not much of a soft-drink consumer.  Maybe one or two a year.  But I have noticed, when I go to a fast-food place, or a movie, that there typically is no drink small enough for me.  In many such places, 16 ounces is "small."  I might suggest to the Mayor that both health and freedom of choice would be better served if he proposed to require all places serving cold drinks in cups to offer an 8-ounce size so that those who want less, for health or other reasons, have a choice.   Let the people decide if they want to be chubby or not.

Wasting Food

The U.S. National Resources Defense Council has studied our habits in throwing out food, concludes that we waste up to 40% of all food produced in the country; or, to put it another way, that food waste costs the average family $2275 a year; or yet another way, that 25% of the stuff in landfills is discarded food.  Phenomenal!  And shameful. 

The study points out that waste occurs for many reasons:  Consumers won't select blemished fruits/vegetables when purchasing; groceries overstock and have to discard food "past its date," restaurants oversize portions so more people leave food on the plate.  Another trend I've noticed is toward temporary packaging: many things are getting put into pouches or pop-top cans. These are lighter and cheaper to produce but they're also clearly more fragile and less lasting.  Tuna in a can can sit on your shelf for ten years if you want; I wouldn't trust tuna in a pouch for even one-tenth of that time.

The study also points to confusing and/or inconsistent dating on food packages as a cause.  I hadn't thought of that, but I'm sure they're correct that with some dates labeled "sell by," others labeled "best by," and still others "use by," people throw out a lot of food that's really quite edible. 

There are a lot of pitfalls in defining shelf life.  We of an older generation, I think, are more likely to take a commonsense approach to what's usable.  We didn't have dated packaging.  The younger folks I suspect take this whole "dating game" more seriously.  At the same time, our overlawyered society errs on the side of extreme caution in setting those dates.  And I can imagine the immense waste that results from occurrences like the late June east coast power outage, when practically every supermarket was required to throw out all its frozen food. 

People have to decide for themselves how to deal with the problem.  I've never just looked at a date on a package or carton and just tossed it out;  I want to look at the contents; my response to a date that's passed is usually to finish the item up sooner rather than later, but if it doesn't look bad, smell bad, or hasn't completely disintegrated (lettuce can deteriorate quickly), it doesn't get wasted.  We're pretty good about buying what we need and using leftovers, and the last dabs get added to a container in the freezer that will eventually become an excellent soup that's different every time.

Overall, it seems we could do a lot better, as has been demonstrated in Europe.

 

The Great Heinz Pickle Mystery

As a kid of about four, I recall, I used to enjoy snacking on a whole dill pickle, applying cream cheese to it with a knife.  I would guess those dill pickles were probably Heinz, because in those days (late 40s) Heinz WAS pickles, and if there were other brands, nobody paid them much attention.  I also recollect that my mother for years used to invoke the Heinz name to indicate large quantity, as in "why, they've got more dresses in that store than Heinz has pickles!"

Things have changed, though.  The Heinz brand of pickles has disappeared from store shelves in my part of the country.  A decade ago, I could still find them in local drugstores (only the "spears" though); now, I am told in some parts of the country (California?) you can find them in Target and Wal-Mart grocery departments (but not in those stores in my area).   You can find a certain type of Heinz pickles being sold online, always in multipacks of huge jars.

Other interesting facts:  Heinz has abandoned the pickle as the theme logo for its "Heinz 57" products, in favor of the tomato.  If you search the Heinz website for "pickles" you won't find a trace of pickles among the product listings there (just a reference to the change of logo above).   If you ask Heinz's public relations department, as I did, whatever happened to their pickle business, you won't get an answer.  The website of Pickle Packers International, a trade organization, lists Heinz as a brand but offers scant info on where they exist.  Finally, a recent Consumer Reports review of pickles covered a number of brands, but failed to give Heinz even a mention, indicating that CR doesn't consider Heinz a player in pickles any longer. 

Well, there are indeed a lot of other kinds of pickles now available, from brands that didn't exist 50 years ago, to locally produced deli brands, so fortunately we aren't lacking for pickles.  Personally, I like the brand purveyed by my local supermarket chain under its own name.  If Mom were still alive, she'd have to adopt a new phrase, but I'm not actively hunting for Heinz pickles except as a matter of curiosity. 

Still, the apparent disappearance of Heinz makes an interesting product life-cycle story.  It seems from all indicators that Heinz has deemphasized pickles in its product line, and may have stopped producing them at all, or could be producing them to be sold under other brand names. If so, those still available, whether on California store shelves or in odd packaging online, may soon be a new category of "collectible."

 

 

Lean Finely Textured Pink Slime

In a surprisingly fast turnabout - only about a week after investigative revelations that the amusingly named "pink slime" is used in up to 80% of ground beef nationwide - nearly all major grocery chains decided to stop using it, and the product's major (only?) producer has shut down three of its four plants and could face bankruptcy.

I grant that "lean, finely textured beef" - which is the maker's term for what it turns out - may in fact be perfectly edible, safe, and yes, even "actual beef" and certainly no worse than what goes into a lot of sausages. I concede that any effort to extract the last bit of food value from the huge amounts of waste that are processed out of slaughterhouses makes economic and environmental good sense.

Thus it's arguable that the recent flap is mainly a public relations disaster. But if so, it's one of the key players' own making. Underlying the marketing strategy is a clear effort to deceive, in which the manufacturer, the FDA, and supermarket chains (let's call them collectively the "Gang of Three") colluded. It could easily have been avoided with a reality check.

The Gang need only have asked themselves what the public's conception of "ground beef" was. Surely the answer would be that it's ground meat with some of its associated fat. LFTB may indeed be "up to 97% lean beef" but to the public it has a very different cachet, so it is not the same as "beef." And it's cheaper. None of the Gang could have been ignorant of those basic facts. None of them could have expected that the consumer, if she/he knew, would accept the presence of LFTB in her "ground beef" with equanimity. The quick retreat by all supermarkets demonstrates the truth of this simple observation.

It's a big blow to owners, employees, and local communities when a business goes under, but if that happens I won't have much sympathy for this company, which undoubtedly lobbied heavily to make sure its product was not listed as a separate ingredient. Meanwhile I await with anticipation the further developments of this saga:

• Will Beef Products Inc. find a new market for LFTB, perhaps by developing a product with a defined - and labeled! - percentage to be sold at a lower price?
• Will the Governors of Texas, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska be shown on tonight's news chowing down on a 100%-LFTB burger? Will they risk their political futures on endorsing the product for consumption by the citizens of their states?
• Will the USG agencies involved promise to use common sense in future in pushing back against industry pressure?
• Will supermarkets admit their own role in this? (HInt: At my own grocery store this past weekend, one of the "reformed offenders," there were no signs suggesting that their ground beef is now free of pink slime, or that it had ever contained it.) Will they be reducing their price as a kind of "deception discount?"

 

A New Meaning To "Sparkling Wine"

I could hardly be expected to read Al Kamen's regular gadfly column in the Washington Post today, without passing along a small part of it (scroll to the bottom, with the subhead "sparklehootch").

It seems California winemakers E & J Gallo have asked the FDA for clearance to add "mica-based pearlescent pigments" to [some of?] their wines. These pigments are, apparently, already being used in such products as canned frostings. In that case, I suppose it won't be long before the FDA approves the Gallo gunk. I guess what goes around comes around. Could this be the next pink slime? I think I recall it was the Romans who used to drink ground limestone in their wine. And look what happened to them.

Eating Well

The media seem constantly preoccupied these days with diet.  Not just in the old sense of weight loss, but also in terms of eating what's good for you.  There's certainly some truth in most of them - it seems that eating vegetables and whole grains is probably a pretty good thing, for example.  But at the same time, there's a lot of nonsense out there.

Take, for example, the idea of "body ecology^TM" that recently came to my attention.  The idea is to avoid eating certain categories of food in combination with certain other categories.  Unfortunately the categories are immensely broad.  Check out the website, particularly the "food combining chart," and perhaps you'll be persuaded that you shouldn't ever eat berries and yogurt with your cereal, or should avoid a pepperoni pizza, because these combinations include food groups that don't get along.  If you're the type that confuses mild occasional gas with "allergy," this approach may be right up your alley, and it may even help you.  But it's not for me.

I realize this idea will attract a certain following, at least until another fad diet comes along, but to me, it's just overreaching.  (Except where it underreaches - it appears for example that some fruits - nonacidic ones - aren't accounted for at all.)  I think the problem is that like many dietary suggestions, it tries to improve on nature.  I'm especially suspicious when the whole concept is trademarked, as this one is.  Nature don't do trademarks!

The evidence of our entire digestive system (our several types of teeth, for example) is that human body is designed to eat pretty much all types of foodstuffs, anything that isn't fatally poisonous.  Based on that, I've found that I can boil down questions of diet to a couple of simple principles:

Eat everything.
Don't eat too much of any one thing.

Or to put it another way, variety and moderation.  The first principle is modified by foods to which you may be truly allergic - i.e., you break out in a rash and can't breathe.  And some of us have a little trouble with the second one.  That's where will power takes over.  Otherwise, it's pretty simple.  Don't mess with Mother Nature.   

Kale Chips

We eat a lot of kale and other greens around our house, usually in a southern-style "mess o'greens" concoction with a little oil, a few tomatoes, and definitely some bacon grease; or italicized with pancetta, white beans and a few black olives.

But here's an interesting novel idea for kale chips, worth consideration, offered by H. Mark Delman on his Planter Tomato blog.   I've tried this and they work out very well.  I recommend cutting down the salt a bit, and also cutting your "chips" fairly large, which makes them a little easier to flip.  They'll never replace potato chips in the overall scheme of my diet, nor are they the thing you need for your guacamole on superbowl day, but they are an interesting alternative for a light snack; and I imagine them as a garnish on a soup, too.

 

Food Costs Through The Roof

I had a surprise today, reviewing what we spent in various categories of ordinary household expenses last year.  The last time we conducted the same review was on expenses for 2005.

Shocker!  Our ordinary food costs, excluding meals out, and excluding wine/beer, were about fifty percent - 50% - higher in 2011 than in 2005.  This increase occurred even though, as we age, we tend to eat less (smaller portions and fewer big meals),  consistently shop price, and seldom buy anything that isn't "on sale."  One might be tempted to think there was a miscalculation somewhere, but I really doubted that; we have very good, thorough data for this in our financial software.

So, looking a bit farther, I ended up at the FAO website (via the intermediary of "ThinkProgress.org").  The FAO publishes a monthly index of world food prices.  It's worth a look.  It confirms not just that prices have gone up, but actually by far more than just 50%; comparing the average index number for 2005 (117) to that for 2011 (about 225) in fact, the FAO index suggests that costs have gone up by over 100%.   I guess we can congratulate ourselves on keeping costs down as much as we have! 

Food costs have increased more than any other category that we consider.  A related category for dining out shows an uncannily similar increase - about 50% - even though we consciously go out less often than we used to.  And while the media love to stir us up with almost daily reports that the cost of gasoline is up another penny or two, it's interesting to note that we paid only about 26% more for gas in 2011 than we did in 2005, for the same amount of driving.  These data suggest we ought to be paying more attention to those occasional reports about food increases, and less to those almost daily ones about gasoline. 

Still, as retirees, we have felt the effects of these rising food costs in the form of feeling frequently pinched, without consciously discerning to what to attribute it.  Other expenses has risen too, and far more quickly than our retirement income (even though the latter is somewhat buffered by cost-of-living increases). 

This insidious cost creep affects everyone, but it's particularly serious for seniors, and more so for seniors at marginal income levels.  It has some clear implications for the future of social security and current talk about altering its cost-of-living calculations downward. 

      

Juice And Old Lace

Everyone seems to be getting excited about arsenic content in commercial fruit juices.  Consumer Reports has put out a report; news media have propagated their study.  Not that we shouldn't expect this news.  Arsenic is not only present in nature - our air, our water - naturally, just as the juice bottlers maintain, but it's also a component of insecticides.

Juice has other disadvantages.  It's usually relatively caloric, because (for example) a typical glass of orange juice contains the juice and calories of at least three oranges.  It's also sweet; naturally, to some extent, but also often excessively so due to the addition of more sugars.   And finally, it's adulterated.  Many juices labeled as a fruit (cranberry juice, cherry juice, apricot juice) contain only a limited percentage of the juice of that fruit, and a large percentage of apple juice.  No doubt this is because apple juice adds sweetness, and because it's cheap.  But it's not what you're paying for.

I was surprised to learn that many mothers are giving infants juice in bottles, several times a day.  Wow.  I suppose they think of it as "natural," but besides the various indignities inflicted upon pure juice by the folks who bottle it, it's useful to keep in mind that drinking juice isn't "natural" at all.  Cavemen, I feel pretty certain, didn't squeeze the juice out of their fruit into some rudimentary stone bowl and drink it.  The ATE THE FRUIT.

So:  Save your kids.  Drink water.  Eat fruit. 

 

Dining Alone

It's not surprising, I suppose, that people who eat solo in restaurants are increasingly being seen fiddling with their smart phones at the table.  A Washington Post article, and a subseqent blog posting, offer a variety of excuses/reasons/justifications for the practice, but they miss a couple of points.

First, this is nothing new.  Before cell phones, solo diners could often be seen reading a book or a newspaper while eating; and at home, the traditional picture of the lonely guy was somebody eating in front of the television.

Second, those whose eyes are glued to their phones may cite various reasons for doing so but they don't seem to acknowledge the real reason:  They're alone and feel uncomfortable at being so.   And they fail to recognize the overriding reason for NOT doing so, which is that dining is an experience to be savored, and if you're a "foodie," as some of these folks claim to be, you're missing the main event while playing with your phone.

The traditional sensible advice for people eating by themselves was to get their noses out of the book, take interest in their food and surroundings, and conquer their sense of awkwardness.  It still works today.  Conquer your fear, throw away your social crutch, and proclaim your independence when you're dining.