Sadly, I can almost see a company deciding something like this is a good idea

(Onion News Network. Talking about how Stouffer's is going to encourage people to "be healthy" by putting tips on suicide-prevention on their dinners-for-one....the corporate assumption being, supposedly, that people eating alone are THAT CLOSE to killing themselves. Heh. This is actually pretty good, considering all the idiotic "enjoy this snack RESPONSIBLY" messages I've seen on things like bags of chocolate squares. Because THAT corporate assumption is that everyone who eats chocolate is an unhealthy pig who can't stop themselves from downing the whole bag.)

Oh, and watch through to the end to see what Kashi company is planning to do. Heh.

Seeing that - it is The Onion, after all - and laughing about it made my head way less spinny than it was after I heard on the news about how the White House Easter Egg Hunt this year is "all about nannying at kids and parents  health" and how they have "sports stations" and crap set up.

My main response: Can we not have ONE THING, ONE DAMN THING that is purely aimed at being enjoyable without having to have some kind of annoying "message"?  Sometimes an Easter egg hunt should just be an Easter egg hunt.

Our National Nanny

Apparently Michelle Obama decided that low-controversy issues (like literacy: I can't imagine anyone being opposed to literacy. Well, unless they were a Taliban guy and it was literacy for women) are not for her.

She's going to attack childhood obesity. By pushing healthier food and more exercise in schools.

I have a general opposition to government pushing that far into people's private lives. One of my biggest concerns in re: government-paid-for healthcare, is that arguably, the taxpayers (who are really the ones paying) would then have the right to dictate what is and is not acceptable behavior: maybe skydiving as a hobby is too risky? Maybe chubby people should be forcibly made to diet, or at least banned from buying fast food? (You laugh, but they talked about trying something similar in Mississippi.)

The issue of childhood health and diet is such a charged one. And what I seem to see are three cases of how people raise their children.

1. Case the first: the parents strive to get healthful food into their kids, but don't make a big fat hairy deal about it. There are set meal-times. Dessert and pop may be possibilities but it is made clear that they are treats, an add-on to an otherwise healthful diet. Fast food and things like pizza are consumed, but again, they are treats, not the usual. There's also allowances made for exercise: the kids are encouraged to go out and play, and if they express interest in a sport, the parents find a team for them to play on. In other words: parents trying to do what's best for their kids. From what I have observed, this is the vast majority of parents.

2. Case the second: Parents want to be their kids' "friend." Or they're really not that well equipped to parent for various reasons. Or they don't know much about nutrition. Or whatever. And they let their kids eat whatever the kids want to eat. I admit to being kind of shocked by the amount of pop some parents let their kids have - more in a day than I as an adult would drink, and far more than what I was allowed as a kid. (And I admit, my main concern is not so much the calories, but the fact that a lot of this is caffeinated pop...I carried out an unsuccessful campaign to not have caffeine-containing pop at Youth Group because there were a couple kids that it severely messed with the attention spans of, but those kids didn't have sufficient self-control yet to say, "No, I shouldn't have that kind.").

These are the parents I think the anti-obesity crusaders are targeting. And yeah, some parents make poor choices. But the problem is, forcing more activity in school or requiring more healthful meals isn't going to really change things that much.

The kids from these families will grow up, and either continue in pattern, or, maybe, they'll realize, "Hey, what I'm eating isn't that great for me, maybe I better change my diet." But it's their choice; it should be there choice. I cringe at anyone who suggests removing kids from a non-abusive home (and say what you will, letting your kid eat Chicken McNuggets isn't abuse) because they're fat - as has been suggested in Britain - is a troubling over-reach of government. Also, nannying at people doesn't work...I'm pretty conscious of health and nutrition and I cover my ears and go "shut up, shut up" when some talking head on the TV goes into a rant about how Americans eat too much salt or too much sugar or whatever. And this is because of...

3. Case the third. These are the parents who are the "alpha" parents. They want to be the best. They want their kids to be perfect. If their kid gets sick, they consider it a personal failing. These are the parents who push their children to exercise an hour a day. And who withhold all sugar, and who also won't let their kids go to birthday parties, or partake in parties at school. These are the parents for whom purity of diet is close to a religion. And they're gonna hear the anti-childhood-obesity message and either feel very smug ("We're better than all the rest of the stupid Americans. Maybe we should even move to Europe") or they're going to get scared and redouble their efforts. ("What? Too much salad can make you gain weight? Better cut the portions and stop serving dressing.")

And yes, that's an extreme, and I'm exaggerating, but I've seen kids who were afraid to eat. Or parents who wouldn't let their kids go out and do the normal kid-socializing thing, because white sugar or white flour or artificial color or food with fat in it or something was being served. And people like this can become crusaders for their cause...and they can get very tiresome.

And their kids grow up with problems. Worse problems, I'd content, than a lot of the fat little kids. The kids don't know how to choose food - they've always had their diet so structured and so accounted-for that when they're faced with a dormitory cafeteria, or a stop at a fast-food restaurant out of necessity on a church mission trip, either they don't eat (because there is no food that is "safe" for them), or they go the opposite direction, and gorge on what was, in the past, "forbidden fruit." And they turn into adults who either rebel against parental strictures and do not make attempts to eat healthfully, or they become like their parents - paranoid, scared about food and safety, and imposing the same restrictive rules on their children. (And as always: I exempt allergies from this. It can be a challenge to raise a kid with peanut allergies (say), and I'd hope that parents inviting that child to birthdays and things would be completely sure to serve food that would not cause a reaction.)

I once saw a commentator on some news show talking about how bake sales in schools should be banned, and treats at parties be replaced with raw veggies. And I've heard it said that any cafeteria worker who's overweight should be made to lose weight or fired.

And these kind of people make me very tired. Again, it's the "this size fits me so it should fit everyone" solution to things.

I acknowledge we have a problem in our culture - we have gone from times of fasting and times of feasting to a time where a lot of us are feasting all the time. And that's arguably not good for our health. But I don't think the other extreme, where all pleasures are banned, where people are made to feel guilty if they don't fit the athletic body type, is a good solution.

I would also suspect that the intervention into the schools will have relatively little impact. I know, there are some who'd like to remove kids from the home influence as much as possible and raise them in Brave New World-like school systems under the "control" of some entity, but that's a really bad and wrong idea. Kids are going to learn attitudes from their parents - right or wrong.

How about, instead of declaring all parents irresponsible and therefore unfit, deciding that parents - at least most people planning on being parents - DO care, DO want to make an effort, DO want to do their best (even if it's not perfect) for raising their kids? And accept the fact that there will be some imperfection, that we don't want an army of state-raised robots who believe the same thing, eat the same thing, do the same work...And yes, continue to remove kids from the home when there is real and true abuse and neglect, but generally let parents do the raising?

(Incidentally, there have been a few cases in the news of "apparent neglect" - where the kids were thin and seemingly undernourished - where the parents were health fiends who were paranoid about their kids getting fat. So they underfed them and did things like restricting fat for kids under 2. Which you should NEVER do (except in some rare metabolic-disorder cases), it screws up normal brain development.)

I really don't like all the "but this is for your own good that we're telling you what to do" attitude in the world today.

I hate "nutrition EXPERTS."

I think when it comes time to renew my subscription to my local paper, I'm not going to. The paper is, on some days, six pages long, four of that being local high-school sports. And recently, they dropped two of the Sunday supplements that I tended to consider "essential" to a paper.

First, they eliminated the color comic supplement. Now, granted, most of the comics my local paper subscribed to were kind of stupid and pointless (A particular un-favorite was something called "Dinette Set," which was never funny, and which gave me the distinct impression that the artist/author really hated the average American and thought they were stupid). But still. To me, a Sunday comic supplement just is part of the paper, and it seems almost heretical to eliminate it.

Then they got rid of the TV Guide (sorry, the "TV advice" - it is not an actual product of TV Guide, tm). That wasn't so bad - I have the on-screen guide through my digital cable, and they had really been phoning in the tv listings for the past few years (they were often wrong, and the guide section didn't list many of the channels that even the mid-range cable subscribers got).

So, we're down to one supplement. That glossy USA Today weekend thing. (You may know it). It's usually kind of lame, celebrity "gossip" that is calculated to bring certain celebrities "top of mind" the week before they release a new CD or movie. Or they have pseudo-heartwarming stories on some kid who gives up his birthday party so that homeless kids can have one. Stuff like that.

But they also have snippets of advice. And you know, sometimes snippets of advice do more harm than good.

There was a particularly infuriating one this weekend. Some "nutrition expert" I've never heard of made the claim that "The typical American breakfast is pure poison"

Hyperbole, much?

There are two failures (perhaps three) contained in that statement.

First, nowhere does he state the "typical American breakfast." So you don't know what he means. Donuts? Cereal? Eggs and bacon? While I can see that donuts do not a nutritious breakfast make, some cereals are certainly nutritionally sound. And eggs and bacon - provided you don't have cholesterol or triglyceride issues - are probably fine as well (I can't face that much protein so early in the day)

So, unmoored from any reference, we simply have a scary statement.

Which is the second failure of the nutritional "expert." And golly day, do I hate it when people do what he just did there. There seems to be an assumption among much of the "para-health" (I am calling it "para-health" as opposed to "health," as a lot of these people are not MDs and many of them are selling something) community that Americans are Teh Stupidz! and the only way to convince of of anything is to scare the pants off of us.

And you know? That just makes me angry. Health reporting is SO poorly done in this nation. I see it all the time in my non-majors class - I have these kids come in who are afraid to eat, afraid to drink tap water, afraid of all this stuff that's pretty harmless, because someone on CBS National News or CNN or some website told them it was gonna kill them. And some people get SO convinced that they are right and a couple hundred years of actual health experience is wrong, that you can't even argue with them. (see: vaccine opponents.)

I don't know what this nutrition "expert" thinks we SHOULD eat (well, he does say "veggie omelets," the though of which makes me want to hurl, at least the though of eating them before 10 am) but I get really tired of being "shoulded" at.

One of the recent new villains? Fruit juice. Even good old orange juice.

It's loaded with sugar, we're told. It has no fiber, we're told. It spikes up insulin and can lead to obesity and (Booga booga booga!) DIABEEEETUS!

I swear, they think that saying "diabetes" is like holding a crucifix up to a vampire. The American people are supposed to recoil, hissing in horror, and immediately switch to a diet of steamed broccoli and brown rice in repentance for former food-sins.

Okay, first off: yes, people with diabetes do need to watch what they eat. I GET that. However, most of us do NOT have diabetes, and regardless of what some doctors would like to do, we are NOT all "pre diabetics."

(Another rant for another time: declaring chunks of the population "pre" some condition, when there are actually very few indications they will actually develop it: pre-diabetic. Pre-hypertensive. They even tried to class all women of childbearing age as "pre-pregnant" a couple years ago. And while I heartily support taking care of your health carefully if you plan to have a child (especially in the next year or so), I also think calling women - like me - who are not married and DO NOT PLAN on having children - and would not put ourselves into a position of unplanned pregnancy - as pre-pregnant is, well, a little bit Big Brother. Like, "Don't drink, don't be exposed to pesticides, eat all your folic acid like a good little girl, so you can make more new taxpayers to feed Uncle State.")

And diabetes is NOT 100% tied to diet. It is NOT 100% tied to obesity, lack of exercise, anything like that. Yes, poor diet and lack of exercise can accelerate someone getting it - and good diet and exercise MAY slow it down. But telling people "OH NOES YOU'RE DRINKING OJ! DIABEEETUS!" is unhelpful.

(Ironic, isn't it? We used to be told there was only one kind of OJ that would kill you. Can I get a rim shot?)

I have a particular objection to the anti-orange juice crowd.

Because, I guess I have to say now, orange juice is one of my few vices. (Gah. Am I in bearded-Spock world, that that sentence even makes sense now?)

I need my orange juice first thing in the morning the way some people need coffee. (I don't drink coffee; I can't. It upsets my stomach). Orange juice is an essential part of my morning.

Now I know how the coffee drinkers felt back some years ago when all the medical experts were nannying at them to give up their favorite morning beverage in the name of health.

The thing is - I've been on a cross-country ski simulator for an hour before I down that OJ. So the whole blood-sugar issue is actually probably in the opposite direction for me - I've burned up any and all remaining muscular glycogen in that past hour, my body's been churning out insulin. I need that damn OJ. (You really wouldn't like me when I'm extremely hungry).

And again - this comes down to the whole, "It works for me, therefore it must be prescribed for everyone else on EARTH" mentality. Okay, fine, some people can't metabolically deal with the big slug of sugar in orange juice. But for those of us who can, don't make us feel guilty for enjoying it.

(Or even if we maybe CAN'T, but aren't suffering any immediate symptoms, leave us the hell alone).

In the same issue there's some advice from Suze Orman, about how the bad economy is apparently making people fat. My one issue with her "advice" is that she falls into the logical fallacy that many naturally-thin people do: "I do not have to work hard to keep my body the slim size it is. Therefore, people who are not thin like me just are lazy bums who don't try hard enough."

I know people who are way UNDERweight - one woman whose doctor actually told her to start drinking milkshakes to try to put some weight on. And it didn't work. Would I go to her and say, "Look, you need to gain weight. But you're just not trying hard enough. Or you have the wrong attitude, or something. Because look at me - I can gain weight easily, without even trying."

I don't know. These kind of stories make me twitchy and sad. Because I am kind of fat - well, "fat" by modern standards of beauty. And because I like good food - but I do not like the typical stuff (broccoli, brown rice, raw things) that the foodists tell you you should eat. I think I do OK - I do eat fruits and vegetables and not much meat and lots of beans and whole grains. And I just get so tired of being told, "I know you're trying but you're doing it WRONG" and being told that even the few healthy pleasures I have in my life either aren't so healthy, or should be replaced by something even more healthy (but far less pleasurable - I've read how some people are pushing other greens, more bitter greens, over baby spinach, because apparently they contain more of the stuff that will keep you from getting dead. And you know? Spinach is about the limit of what I can manage, thanks. Don't tell me I must eat something that tastes like the south end of a northbound horse, and if I don't, I'm totally wasting my time and I deserve whatever horrible illness I get.

Because that's the vibe I get off of some of these people: if you don't take my advice and enter into the dietary equivalent of wearing a hair shirt, you DESERVE diabetes and heart disease and cancer and all the rest. And people like that are heartily welcome to take a flying leap, because what happens if someone does all they recommend and still gets sick (as all of us will?))

I don't know but I suspect as there's a run-up to pushing for socialized medicine there will be more and more of these scare stories, and if we DO get socialized medicine, they won't be stories any more - you will be TOLD by your doctor what you can and cannot eat, and perhaps even in the future you will be permitted only to buy certain foods. (You think it can't happen? Remember the story last year about some state - Alabama, I think? where a legislator proposed banning the obese from certain restaurants? It could happen.)

Critical Thinking FAIL

This is going to be ranty and screedy. But as I said before, there seems to be such an excess of stupid in the world right now that I can't quite deal with it.

Have you heard the latest news about "evil" High Fructose Corn Syrup?

That it contains - ZOMG - MERCURY! Booga booga booga!

Okay - mercury is bad. Some forms (like methyl mercury - Minimata Bay, Japan is a case study I will always remember from Environmental Geology) are worse than others, but yes, I agree, mercury is not something we want exposure to.

However - the amounts of mercury detected?

0.113 parts per million (source of this information).

My reaction upon reading that?

"Wow. I didn't know they made equipment sensitive enough to detect that small an amount."

I think Ken - if he is reading this - will agree with me.

Maybe an illustration of a part per million (or ppm) will help, for those who don't use chemistry daily. A part per million is about equivalent to one drop of water in the gas tank of a small car. The amount of mercury we're looking at here would be equivalent to one tenth of that.

I dare say we are exposed to a greater amount of mercury from the ambient air pollution we all breathe. (Coal-fired electrical plants produce small quantities of mercury). If you live anywhere near the Canadian Shield, you are probably exposed to natural sources of mercury from it.

(Sources of mercury in the environment from the USGS).

Okay. So mercury in tiny quantities, while not something to be happy about, is probably not something that will make your children developmentally delayed, make you sick or crazy, or cause you to develop cancer. And even if it is, it is probably not something that can be eliminated from our environment. That's just how it is.

So, now on to the Critical Thinking FAIL part of the program.

I am on a networking website - one devoted to fiber crafters. There are message boards on there...some devoted to technical aspects of the craft, some more general. On one of the general boards there was this topic:"ALERT: Mercury found in High Fructose Corn Syrup."

I read the entire thread last night. It grew increasingly strident and crazed. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, people said. THIS IS HURTING THE CHILDREN. Other people smugly reported how they NEVER consumed anything with HFCS, and that thinking people would do well to do likewise.

I kept hoping for a voice of reason to step up - for someone to say, "Hey guys, I'm a chemist. Avoid HFCS if you wish for dietary reasons, but this really isn't the end of the world."

But no. It grew increasingly unbalanced. One poster claimed that chicory and inulin were "other names" for it. (Chicory is a plant, rather like a dandelion, of which the root is used to flavor things. It is the famous ingredient in New Orleans style coffee. Inulin is made from starch; it is a naturally occurring fiber and it can help with absorption of certain nutrients in the human gut).

I so dearly wanted to go in there and open up a can of Scientific Tushie-Whip on those fools. But I didn't. You know what stayed my hand?

People who hold those kind of emotional opinions don't want to listen to science.

I almost posted. ALMOST. Then I thought of how I'd be hounded. How people would flame me, would speculate on how I was maybe a "shill for the industry"

(Trust me, I'm no fan of HFCS. I don't like how it tastes in stuff; I don't drink pop mainly because I don't like the sticky-sweet aftertaste it gives pop. I'm also not entirely convinced that it's metabolized "just the same as" sugar; there are a few small studies suggesting it affects insulin differently than sucrose-based sugars do. But I think the issue could be taken care of on a "marketplace" basis - let those who dislike HFCS request products without it, and be willing to pay the premium they command. Those who don't care, fine - they are probably really not going to be hurt at all by consuming the stuff.)

I could imagine days upon days of "private messages" sent to me screaming at me and telling me how I was WRONG and EVIL and STUPID and DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE CHILDREN WHO ARE NOW PROBABLY GOING TO GET AUTISM FROM THIS IF THE VACCINES DON'T CAUSE IT FIRST.

That kind of thing.

The one thing I will observe, though: I really, really hope they don't start a grassroots movement to ban HFCS. Because I can only imagine the unintended consequences that would come from that - probably other sweeteners would be banned as well, in the worst-case we could see our cereal choices dwindle down to Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes, or unsweetened shredded wheat. And cookies, cake, and ice cream become black market items. In the less-than-worst-case scenario, food prices go up sharply because manufacturers have to use more expensive alternatives than HFCS.

I can kind of see a connection between this and the CPSIA issue I talked about a week or so ago: contamination shows up. "Something must be done!" Something is done, but it turns out it casts a net far wider than needed. Consumers and small businesspeople suffer.

In this case, it's slightly different: the lead and melamine contamination of toys really WAS a problem. Perhaps it was a problem that, had the proper existing laws have been adhered to, would not have happened. Mercury in trace amounts - in some cases too small to be detected - in one component of some foods - is not a problem on the order of a Dora the Explorer doll covered in paint with lead.

I used to say that if someone said, "We must do this for the children" that meant my taxes would soon go up. I think I'm going to add that if someone says "Something must be done!" it means my freedom and choice in the marketplace will soon decrease.

this is why...

I don't read Scientific American, I read American Scientist (which is written BY scientists and by and large, FOR scientists) instead:

Oh noes, bugs in our FOODZ, says American Scientist.

It's cochineal. One of the safest red dyes out there. It's been used for YEARS. And by the time they're done extracting it, there are no bug parts left - it's really little different from squeezing beet juice out of beets and using it to color things. There's really no beet in there.

I'd a million times rather eat dye that comes from a bug, that's been used safely for a very long time, than consume some dye that was concocted recently in a lab, which has been tested but not long-term tested. (I have similar concerns about artificial sweeteners)

(And yes, I realize that is somewhat unreasonable given my stance about other things. But I'm not saying aspartame should be BANNED, I'm just saying, label food with it and give me the CHOICE to buy something sugar-sweetened vs. something aspartame-sweetened)

The other thing that really, really gets to me? Scientific American referred to these things as "cochineal beetles." THEY ARE NOT BEETLES. They are scale insects. Different species, different order, different animal. (While this isn't as egregious as trying to reclassify fish as "sea kittens," it's still a taxonomic error and it BUGS me that a publication with "Scientific" in its name did that)

I am also irritated that Scientific American apparently used CSPI - also known as the Chicken Littles of the food world (except, they might say chicken is DANGEROUS!) as their source. Please. They are an advocacy group. They are not researchers. They are big into knee-jerk things, they are big into scare tactics. (Oddly enough, not that different from PETA). If we let them run the show, we'd be subsisting on organic kale and reverse-osmosis purified water. And you better not enjoy that kale too much!

I'm not even going to GET into the issue about "allowable bug parts" under the USDA, but suffice it to say, that box of Corn Flakes is likely NOT 100% pure corn flakes.

Scientific American, you lose.

I really hope this isn't a hallmark of a larger trend - some advocacy group comes out, screaming about something that really we don't need to be upset about (There have been three adverse reactions to cochineal dye in the past ten years - fewer than there have been to gluten, eggs, and many other "safe" food items.). Yet the CSPI apparently wants this stuff banned.

Look, if you're entomophobic - read the label. Don't buy anything colored with cochineal. But trust me - I've been eating stuff with cochineal dye in it since I was a little kid and it is totally safe (unless you are one of those 3 out of probably 100 million people who is allergic). I suspect cochineal is safer than Red 40 or Red 2.

I really hope this isn't the tone for the coming years. I hope the Administration and the Cabinet are smart enough and not easily influenced enough that they don't start doing idiotic, law-of-unexpected-consequences-generating things by banning stuff just because a bunch of hotheads get to screaming that it should be banned.

I can forsee a future where lots of things are banned because of their "potential danger" - not just cochineal but also guns, booze, cigarettes, animal fats, sugar, artificial sweeteners, vaccines, toys....the list goes on. Almost anything that is useful and or enjoyable to someone, there is probably an "advocate" out there with more emotion than brains who is spinning themselves up to start talking about how it should be banned.

(And as Bug Girl cites on her blog post - it's a source of a living wage to poor Central American farmers. So won't you think of the peasants?)

I realize I've ranted about a lot of things this week but there seems to be an unusually great amount of stupidity in the news these days.

COMMON SENSE, people, it's called COMMON SENSE. There seems to be a severe deficit of it these days.

ArrrGGGGgggggRRRRhhhhh....

I had left a certain particular channel on (which shall remain nameless but which I will say is one that has gone dangerously off-topic in the past couple years, replacing their normal useful reporting with speculative stories that Could Happen Tomorrow and having extremely nannying programming on how we must change our lives to save the planet).

I was working on something I couldn't immediately get up from to find the remote, when the nannying program came on.

And dammit, my head nearly exploded. It featured a Famous Author, who has apparently made it a Project to eat locally - in fact, to only eat food (with three exceptions; I'll refer back to that later) that she and her family grew.

And of course, there's so much of the self-congratulatory patting-on-the-back I wanted to vomit. How healthy we all are! So much better than ALL THE OTHER AMERICANS who eat their McSlop or the stuff in cartoony boxes from the grocery store! How enlightened we are! We now know where eggs come from! We are just full of goodness and health!

Well, you're full of SOMETHING.

Look. I have no problem with people choosing to do this. But all too often, they get so caught up in it (There is no zealot like a convert, the old saying goes) that they begin to believe that:

a. They can save the world, if they just convince enough people to do as they do. And then everyone will love them!

b. Everyone SHOULD do as they do, even if it means forcing them through taxes or other coercive measures.

Look, Author Lady. I am happy that you were able to raise your own chickens and turkeys and grow your own produce. But you are also Rich Author Lady who can devote many hours a day to tending gardens and poults and do not need to work 5-6 days of the week for 7 to 8 hours most of those days.

Those of us mere mortals, who must do that - there's no way in hell we can raise our own food. I know; I've tried growing tomatoes, beans, beets, and other things. The beans were moderately successful; the tomatoes, either they get eaten by possums, or it's too dry out (and I don't have time to be home watering during the optimal hours of the day) or they get blossom-end rot or something.

And Famous Author Lady? Know what I'm doing in my job that requires me to use the (apparently) Gaia-raping grocery store? I'm helping prepare the NEXT FREAKING GENERATION OF DOCTORS AND NURSES, among other things. So when some of your disciples who live in less amenable climates than you apparently do wind up coming down with scurvy or beriberi or some damn thing because all they have to eat all winter that is locally-grown are a few shriveled turnips and the remains of the hogs they butchered in the fall, there'll be someone out there who can save their sorry asses.

(Seriously, that is something I wonder about with the really hard-core "eat local" folks - will they wind up developing some of the vitamin deficiencies that we haven't seen in 80 years because of the wider availability of produce year-round? Just like the people who refuse to vaccinate their special snowflake of a child against polio - because vaccines are BAD and they know it because Jenny McCarthy told them so - have never, ever seen an actual case of infant paralysis, and would be hieing their kid to the doctor for the needle if they had - this seems to me to be a case of people not knowing history, not knowing what the "bad old days" really were like).

The other thing is - apparently Famous Author lives in some watered valley in New Mexico or somewhere that is apparently a virtual Garden of Eden, where almost anything will grow. As I said, I've tried beans, tomatoes, beets, watermelons, and squash where I lived. The beans were pretty good. The tomatoes, some years they produce, some years the tomatoes wither on the vines, some years animals get them. The beets died. (I can't get the hang of when to plant things here). Both the melons and the squash were taken down by borers. There is some member of the animal kingdom that will kill and eat almost any garden food you try to grow. So for me, honestly? It is more cost-effective to go to the "evil" supermarket and buy my produce pre-grown. (Or go to the apparently less-evil Farmer's Market, though I have it on good authority that some of their food is "imported" from a produce agent - and therefore, not locally grown).

We just do NOT have good growing conditions where I live. We can raise peanuts, I guess, and cattle, and hogs, and we used to grow cotton, before cotton was deemed an Evil Crop (high pesticide requirement). I can't live on peanut-butter covered bacon or steak with a side of boiled peanuts.

And yeah, yeah, by her lights, maybe people shouldn't live here. But we do, and this is where my job is, and I'm unwilling to chuck it to live in a yurt and brew my own yogurt.

Oh, the "three exceptions" to eating local? They didn't mention two of them but one was coffee. And this was brought up just after a big point was made about how the kids weren't able to go and get McDonald's French Fries any more. And I thought, "Nice. They make "exceptions" but they're for stuff the parents eat; the kids remain deprived." (Then again, I don't even like coffee).

The other thing - this was an entire family. The kids, the husband (you didn't see much of him; maybe he wasn't as down with the project as his wife) were available to help out. For people like me, with only me to depend on - I'd starve. Or I'd be shipped off to some kind of communal-living situation where I'd wind up curled up in the fetal position on the dining room floor, quietly sobbing and eating my hair, because I really canNOT stand to live in close quarters with other people I don't know well, to listen to their endless braying conversations, to be subjected to their own personal soapbox issues, to have someone eat my secret smuggled-in stash of chocolate because it's "contraband" (not being "local").

I think one of my biggest frustrations is with people who think because something works for THEM, it will work for EVERYONE - and what's more, everyone should adopt what they are doing, whether they want to or not. And this is usually coupled with a strong evangelistic vigor for whatever-it-is and a sense of their being a "voice crying in the wilderness" - that they are here to drag others, kicking and screaming if need be, into the enlightenment they have found, so that EVERYONE can be as superior a person as they now are.

(Actually, I wonder about that last. Some of the people with this attitude ("I lost weight! You can too!" "I ditched my television and I feel so much better now!" "I stopped buying anything but the bare necessities!") seem to have a need to feel superior to others - and so, when everyone has converted, they may need to find some new cause to follow so they can once again distinguish themselves from the pack.

I know, I know - this person is probably just a harmless idiot and I shouldn't get so overwrought at what she's saying. But it really rubs me the wrong way to hear someone who has more money and free time than I do preaching at me about how I should go to (what would amount for me to) an extreme and time-consuming effort to only eat food grown within 200 miles or whatever the proposed limit is of where I live. (And then have them sit back, smile, and sip their imported coffee while I agonize how I will live in a World Without Orange Juice.)

Locavory

I don't know if you all have been exposed to this "movement" or not, but - there are a group of people who refer to themselves as "Locavores." ("Local" + "-vore" like in carnivore, only the fact that these people eat locally produced food).

And this is one of those things I kind of hate about a certain segment of society.

See, I like going to farmer's markets. I like buying honey that was locally made. If there were an egg farm within reasonable driving distance of me, I'd go there for eggs. I like the idea of food production being somewhat decentralized, both because I like the thought of people who WANT to farm (without having to have a soybean field the size of Manhattan) being able to farm, being able to make a living doing what they love. And also because I keep that thought in the back of my head that if something very big, very bad happened (like, God forbid, some kind of attack on the shipping industry), there'd still be things available locally for people to eat.

But I hate the concept of locavory. Because like so many of the Stuff White People Like, it becomes a pissing contest waaaaaaay too fast.

Because it seems people are incapable of making some kind of lifestyle choice without either (a) feeling the masses need to be evangelized or (b) using it as Evidence of How They Are Better Than Everyone Else.

I knew people like that in college. Now, "locavory" didn't exist as such (though there was a big nice farmer's market in my college town, where I often went on Saturdays to buy the few vegetables I willingly ate in those days and also to people-watch). But some of the students - especially the College of Natural Resources students - would do this thing:

"Well, I'm a vegetarian."
"Well, I'm a vegan"
"Oh, I'm not only a vegan, I also only shop at co-ops."
"Yeah, I do all that, plus I have a plot in the community gardens every summer."

And it's like: STOP IT. Okay? You win the Good Person Olympics.

The remarkable thing to me, is some of those same folks would wrinkle up their noses about the kids on campus who were involved with religion: "Those Christians - they think they're BETTER than me."

Mote, meet beam.

So I see this starting up and I kind of roll my eyes - oh please, don't ruin my pleasure in shopping at Farmer's Markets by turning it into one of those things "right thinking" people do. Don't make it some kind of f$&^ing badge of honor. Just let me buy my green beans and beets in peace, without assuming a particular reason for why I do it.

I can't stand how some people get to be such tools about stuff they do.

One of the other things - and this is where the whole extreme-purity-of-purpose runs against the messy real world: on one of the bulletin boards I read, there's a section for people who are into locavory. And one of the topic headings was something like "IT'S FLOODED HERE. HOW DO I EAT?" And it wasn't that - we have no food, we need help. It was - I can no longer buy the exclusively-local food I want because the fields are under water, how do I maintain my locavore cred in this situation?

And see, my response would be: do what most of the rest of the country does and go to the Wal-mart. Or the Publix. Or the Kroger's. Or the Safeway. You're not going to be struck dead by eating a carrot that was trucked in from Maine, I promise.

(The other thing that gets me about extreme locavory - we're told by the Health Powers that Be to eat a hugely diverse diet with some not-in-this-lifetime number of vegetable servings per day. What do you do as a locavore in the dead of winter when the two kinds of local veggies you have are turnips and potatoes? Do you eat turnips until you turn into one? That's the whole thing that people like Laura Ingalls Wilder had to do, and that's why people rejoiced when grocery stores started carrying produce from other regions.

Also - does that mean you never get to have spices? Never cinnamon toast, because cinnamon is grown in Sumatra or somewhere? That seems too much to me.)

Like any kind of extremism, I'm highly suspicious of it. What irritates me is that people with that smug, "I'm better than the human algae that shop at Wal-Mart" attitude becomes something I have to deal with when I go to the natural-foods store or to the farmer's market.

The r-word.

You may have heard that there are some chains - and it's not entirely clear if it's just in SoCal or if it's elsewhere - that are limiting rice purchases (so far it looks like Costco and Sam's Club.) This is because there's apparently a shortage of rice, or at least rice from parts of southeast Asia.

(the rice I tend to buy comes from Texas; I haven't heard anything about problems with the rice crop there).

The news stories - I'm not going to link any because the few that I found and read irritated me and I don't feel like finding one that doesn't - refer to it as "rationing."

There are also dark allusions to "flour and cooking oil are being 'rationed' in Queens, NY." (I have no confirmation on that last one.)

Okay. This is where I get really irritated at those who write these things up.

The word "rationing" has a lot of connotations to it. Those who remember WWII faced some food rationing (it was MUCH worse in Great Britain than it was here; I'm reading a book currently on conditions in WWII and post-WWII Great Britain and it's moderately shocking how little people were permitted during the worst of it. Oh, I understand the reasons why - it's still shocking.)

I don't see this as "rationing." My understanding of the WWII situation is that in Great Britain, it was because shipping lanes were largely blockaded - and it is a challenge for an island nation to grow enough food to support itself. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the young, able-bodied folk who would normally bring in the harvest were either in the military forces or working defense jobs. (Hence the "Land Girls." My parents have a friend who - though she doesn't use that term - from her description of what she did as a teenager in WWII in Britain, I think she must have been a Land Girl. I don't like to ask her more about it because she doesn't seem to want to bring up those memories, as fascinating as they are to me.)

In the U.S., I think lot of it had to do with companies re-tooling for defense production (no tin cans) and also, the desire to supply the fighting forces (and also land-lease countries) with food.

I suppose you could also make the argument that the sacrifice made people feel more that there "was a war on" (and of course things like gasoline and tires and nylon were rationed as well).

I see the current situation as being a lot more akin to the situation with the Nintendo Wii than I do with true rationing. Here is a product that is in (hopefully) temporarily short supply, you want to ensure that people get a fair crack at getting it, so you limit how much any one person can buy (and I believe the limit was something like 80 lbs. of rice, so unless you're a restaurant owner, you're not going to really face problems. I don't know how fast an average, say, Japanese-American family eats up rice, but 80 pounds is a whopping great lot of rice, in my book).

It's also not unlike what some groceries do with "loss leader" specials - limit quantities purchased so that Jane Doe (who comes in to shop at 8 am) buys up all the cheap hotdogs, and Joe Blow (who can't come in until, say, noon) gets angry because they're all gone.

But I do not see it as "rationing." And I think it was irresponsible for the news outlets - and whoever used it first - to use that word.

(And here is a story (warning: popup ads) that discusses the Texas rice crop. And breathes a little sense into what's going on.

The rice that is "limited" are two "aromatic" varieties (jasmine and basmati) which are grown in East Asia. There is no shortage of Texas-milled rice, the article says, but it is considered a "less desirable" sort by the (primarily immigrant) community that is heavily buying rice.

I don't know - the rice I use is a Texas-grown version of basmati and it's pretty darn good. And I think I've had jasmine rice that was grown in this country. True, you pay a little premium for it - but here is where I tend to get a bit jingoistic - I prefer to buy food grown in my own country whenever possible. Both for reasons of "US farmers get paid" and for reasons of "there's unlikely to be some kind of funky pesticide illegal in the US in there.")

But anyway. A lot of news outlets NOT AS CLOSE to the concept of growing rice as the Beaumont (TX) Enterprise is, are using the "rationing" word.


Because "rationing" is one of those OH NOES! words. One of those words that makes the inner survivalist come out in some people. (I admit it; it nearly did in me when I first heard the news. Before I thought it through, I thought, "Maybe I better run out to the grocery and buy some rice, just to have." Never mind that I don't eat rice daily, never mind that I have a barely-opened 3-pound tub of "Texmati" rice, never mind that were I live, if you don't freeze or refrigerate grain products you're going to store long-term, they will get buggy after a while. It caused that knee-jerk reaction in me and when I figured it out, I got annoyed).

Because that word is going to bring out the same instinct in a lot of people. The limits were put into place to ensure everyone got a supply and to prevent food hoarding. Well, what do you think people - especially 21st century Americans who are used to getting whatever they want whenever they want it, and some of whom take the "screw everyone else; I'm getting mine, no matter what the cost" attitude - will do in the face of "rationing"?

They'll dream up ways around it. (Even in "real" rationing they did - James Beard once said something along the lines of "Everyone knew someone who would sell rationed foods 'under the table.' It was considered chic - somewhat like circumventing Prohibition.")

(I admit some of my admiration for the man died when I read that. Say what you will about WWII food rationing, but people who willfully cheat it - because they can, because it's chic - there's something a little disgusting about that.)

Anyway - by playing up the story, by going with the usual news-instinct to make it sound as bad as possible - it's going to freak people out and possibly make problems worse.

(You want REAL problems? Try being a poor Malaysian who actually depends on rice as a staple and has no other sources for it. Apparently Malaysia was confronting Thailand the other day because Thailand promised to sell them a certain amount of rice and now have reneged.)

And of course, some people run with this - on one blog I read that linked to one of the news stories, there were looming conspiracy concerns. And comments about how "Wal-mart isn't restocking regularly any more; the shelves look kind of bare now." And there are other, agreeing comments: yes, yes, one of the employees agreed, it's because they're not sending as many trucks full of food now in order to save money on diesel. (So: "OH NOES eeeeeeviiiilll Wal-mart is going to starve us instead of making us come in and buy unhealthy food and cheap crap made in China." I almost feel sorry for Wal-mart; they can't catch a break from the haters.)

So, I figured I'd take a look this morning. (I had to buy groceries anyway). I headed out to the local Wal-mart at 6:30 this morning (yes, I get up at the buttcrack of dawn even on the weekends; 6:30 is actually sleeping late for me).

Shelves pretty full.

Even the rice shelves - there were a couple empty slots (I think the brown rice was sold out, but as far as I'm concerned, no great loss there. Brown rice is one of those things that healthists push and which I think tastes like ass). But there was plenty rice. And plenty beans. And plenty meat in the meat case (I don't buy my meat at wal-mart, though, there's a small regional dairy-store chain that sells far better quality meat at competitive prices). Plenty of milk, yogurt, eggs, butter, produce...all the stuff I needed. Nothing seemed to be sold out. And there were few people there at 6:30 am but it didn't seem like any of them were girding up for Food Distribution Armageddon.

Now, don't get me wrong: it's pretty smart to have a certain amount of emergency food on hand. I keep enough canned beans and tomatoes and other stuff I could eat (even if I had no way of heating it up - canned tomatoes may not taste GREAT at room temperature but they are edible). But I don't see any evidence here of a mass freak-out. Which is good. I'd hate to have to go all Zombie Apocalypse on some guy grabbing all the cans of black beans off the shelf because he "needs" them all.


And there are other people using this as another stick to beat Bush with. (heh. Stick. Bush.) One of the newspaper-bloggers said something along the lines of "This coming few months will be BAD but when we get someone new in the White House, they will fix it."

(Actually? The resident of the White House making a move to "fix" temporary shortages of one particular type of food? That scares me more than the shortages do)

But I predict we will hear more "food insecurity" stories over the summer, designed to make people worry, make people begin to say things like "The government should DO something to ensure we are all fed!" And I bed Obama and Clinton and even McCain will come out with grand statements of what they are going to do to ensure "food security"

(and I will eat a bag of that much-hated-by-me brown rice if one of them actually comes up with a phrase along the lines of "a pound of rice in every pot.")


Just you wait.

look for the warning label...

I linked to A Big Victory's post earlier - the one about the mother whose child choked on a popcorn kernel, and is now calling for mandatory labeling of movie theater popcorn.

I don't know. I recognize that when something bad happens to your kid, it's a tragedy, and you just want to do what you can to prevent anyone else from having the same problem.

But I'm getting kind of frustrated at warning labels.

Today, I noticed my front-door lock was sticking badly - it took me five minutes of jiggling and twisting my key to get it to open at lunchtime. So I ran down to the friendly local hardware store and bought a tube of that graphite stuff.

As I was getting ready to spray it in the lock, I noticed this on the side of the tube:

"Warning: this product contains substances known to cause cancer in the state of California"

(To paraphrase the old joke about the hillbilly kid and the Thermos bottle: "How do it KNOW?")

Poor grammar aside (I think that phrase should be "...known in the state of California to cause cancer" or, better "...SUSPECTED in the state of California to cause cancer"), it made me wonder: how often are people (outside of manufacturing it, where I'd hope there'd be proper controls) exposed to powdered graphite? I've lived in my house five years and this is the first time I've had to hit the locks...and I have never yet had to do my car locks, but I know my dad would sometimes have to put graphite in some of his car locks every couple years or so.

But why the scare tactics? Is it corporate CYA, or did someone who got some horrific lung cancer from snorting powdered graphite sue them? And why California? (no, I know, you don't need to answer that question)

And on my chocolate now they're doing it. I bought a big big bag of those little squares of the fancy Hershey's "Cacao Reserve" chocolate. And what was on the bag? A little warning that goes something like this:

"Like any indulgent treat, please enjoy Cacao Reserve in moderation."

The hell you say. No, I thought I'd just sit down and eat the whole two-pound bag in one sitting. After all, they're saying chocolate is "health food" now.

Honestly? Little nannying warnings like that actually make me want to eat a bigger portion at a time than I might otherwise, you know, just to stick it to "the man."

Oh, and the last time (like, about 4 months ago) I bought a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup out of the vending machine here? It actually said on the package:

"Please enjoy responsibly"

Yeah - just like it says on the Captain Morgan ads, or those ones with that creepy Tony Sinclair guy.

I'm not even sure what the Reese's people MEANT by 'responsibly.' Don't eat eighteen of them at once? Don't throw the wrapper on the ground when you're done with it? Don't taunt your little brother with it: 'ha, ha, I have a peanut butter cup and you don't'? Don't eat them if you're peanut-allergic? What?

Vague warning statements only serve to tick me off. Almost as much as nannying warning statements.

Look, Hershey's - I know chocolate can make me fat. Probably at least 5 pounds of the extra avoirdupois I'm carrying around (heck, 10 pounds, probably) comes from my consumption of chocolate from the time I was about 10 on. It's my problem. I'm not gonna sue you over it. You didn't make me fat - the fact that I like chocolate, dislike jogging, and have a slow metabolism combined to do that.

Don't ruin my tiny little enjoyment of my tiny little square of chocolate by shaking a finger in my face and telling me to "enjoy, but responsibly." There are a lot of things I could metaphorically relate that to, but most of them aren't "family friendly," so I won't go there. Suffice it to say - "enjoy, but responsibly" is kind of like fixing a bubble bath but waiting to get in until all the bubbles collapse, lest you get soap in your eyes.

And Graphite Manufacturers of America - don't worry me as I'm trying to figure out how to fix my lock so it won't take 10 minutes for me to get in my house on the first 40-degree, horizontal-rain day of the year but talking to me about cancer and how Californians are worried about it. There are some things I really probably don't need to know.

packing a lunch

Well, that little silly quiz thing got quite a bit of response (and no, I don't think Club Sandwiches are necessarily my mortal enemy - it's just funny, I think, because PB&J is the classic "kid" sandwich, and club sandwiches are, in my mind at least, about as grown-up as a sandwich can get).

Soon it will be time for me to start carrying lunches to school again.

I was trying to think about what I took as a school kid - I know I always packed a lunch and never bought - the olive-green steam-table green beans that were a regular 'vegetable' in the "bought" lunch scared me, as did the super-rubbery jello (I don't know of anyone actually EATING the jello cubes; they were mostly used as toys.) I remember once sitting at my table (we had little tables-of-four in junior high school) talking with my friends (or rather, the three other people who would deign to sit with me at lunch - my former BFF having recently been accepted into the "popular" clique and not wanting to be seen with me any more. And yes, I'm still kind of bitter about that - and it's probably why I never ever had someone I regarded as a "best friend" ever again), when a cube of red jello came flying out of nowhere, bounced off the center of our table, and made it to the center of the table next to us.

And they put soy - or something that had hulls in it anyway - in the hamburger patties.

So I carried my lunch from home. I think I kind of alternated between a couple different things - peanut butter, cream cheese sandwiches (yeah, I was kind of a weird kid), and sometimes something in a "cold pack" - either cottage cheese or cottage cheese and fruit (again: weird kid. I don't know too many people who willingly ate cottage cheese at 12).

My brother was even worse: for a couple years all he wanted was jelly sandwiches. And not just any jelly; my mother's homemade apple-mint jelly. (Oh, I'm sure he had other things in his lunch - he wasn't malnourished or anything).

I remember lunchboxes. They were cool until, I guess, about 4th or 5th grade. First, I had Disney, then I had Peanuts, then I had a plain tartan lunchbox. Then I carried my lunch in a paper sack. It seems like metal lunchboxes - after years of being declared a Dangerous! Hazard! are coming back, at least as kitsch pieces for generation Xers (I saw some for sale at, of all places, the Books A Million recently. It didn't explicitly say on them NOT FOR CHILDREN'S USE so maybe they are being offered again for kids). I never cared too much for plastic lunchboxes.

(If I were about 10 years younger and about four times cooler than I am, I would have bought one and used it for my lunches. But I don't think I can get away with that kind of club-kid, "I'm self-consciously being immature!" thing any more.)

I carry a lunch pretty much every day to work, now. It's cheaper than eating out, probably healthier (most of the restaurants here in town, you order at by speaking into a large fiberglass advertising-character head), and I don't lose my parking space.

But - you know, it's kind of boring. And sometimes kind of depressing: oh, here I am at my desk again, eating lunch number 45 of 180 for this year.

I don't put a lot of thought into my lunches. Which is probably why they're kind of boring. The typical, rarely-deviated-from pattern is this:

yogurt
some kind of fruit or salad in a little tub
granola bar
maybe a bit of cheese, or a hardboiled egg if I happen to have one on hand
maybe some crackers
a tiny square of chocolate or a cookie.

Not very much, and yeah, I'm usually hungry when I get home around 4 or so. But - I'm packing my lunch at 6:30 am, I've already been up an hour and a half and done my workout and gotten cleaned up and dressed, and taking the time to pack an elaborate lunch just feels - I don't know, it just feels like yet another chore so early in the morning when I still have the real chores of the day ahead of me. (And as for packing the night before - I've tried it; it doesn't work. Sandwiches, even when refrigerated, become gluey and unappealing after an overnight plus six hour stay. And some nights I don't get home until 9 pm - so it would be yet another chore at the end of the day).

I have discovered a few things that make lunch a little happier.

Like those tiny triangular "Laughing Cow" cheeses. They taste fairly good, they seem to keep okay even without refrigeration (one of my colleagues has a little refrigerator in her lab but I'm always competing for space - of course she needs room for her lunches and little bottle of milk, but one of my other colleagues also fills it up with the weird natural-foods-store soft drinks he likes.)

And dried fruit. Not just raisins - figs (which freak people out for some reason; they're all, WTF is that? WTF are you eating?). Prunes (yeah, you can make jokes, but they're sweet, they have nutrients, and they don't get squished in a lunch kit). Dates (extremely sweet but a couple go a long way)

And those "100 calorie" packs of stuff. Yeah, I know - as someone who rolls her eyes at the increasing nannydom of our food, who rants about things (actually, I haven't yet, but will) like Hershey's "disclaimer" about "enjoy this in moderation only!" on their chocolate products, I still like them. Why? Because, number 1, they're easy. I can have a bunch of the boxes lined up on the shelf, and I can just reach in and grab whatever thing I feel like that day - cheet-os "asteroids" (uh-huh, huh, huh, huh) or little cookies, or goldfish - whatever. And I don't have to portion it out and pack it and wrap it and all that. And that's a good thing, first thing in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, I know - I should buy the "bulk" bag of something and some kind of reusable washable plastic container and do it the environmentally-friendly way. Except the problem is, the "bulk" bag and the container sit on the shelf because I don't have the energy at 6:30 am to weigh out all of my foodstuffs for the day. So I'll drive less, or something, to make up. Bite me, Gaia.

One of my colleagues brings those "healthy" frozen dinners (there is a freezer in the breakroom fridge but it's across the building from me). But. meh. I don't want broccoli from the Ice Age with my lunch. And usually I'm actually not hungry enough to want "Chicken Divan made Light!" or whatever.

And I'm just not that big on sandwiches. Part of it is the "eww, it's been sitting six hours!" sense. But part of it that I'm just not crazy about cold cuts. I will take a peanut butter sandwich from time to time (especially if I have good whole-wheat bread on hand), or if I have egg salad on hand (sorry, Ann Althouse, but I love the stuff) and a good shot at getting space in the fridge, I'll take a little jar of egg salad and two pieces of toasted white bread

It occurs to me that I should give my fussy-eater rundown of what type of bread is acceptable with what type of sandwich.

Peanut butter is pretty much good on anything. It's best, IMHO, on a good whole wheat or on something like Anadama bread (the problem with Anadama bread is you have to bake it yourself, or find someone to bake it for you - it's not commercially available).

Peanut butter sandwiches that are intended to be eaten alongside of a bowl of chicken soup (which is actually a pretty good meal combination) should be on white bread. And always crunchy peanut butter for me.

Egg salad pretty much has to be on white bread, toasted. And it gets cut diagonally. (Peanut butter is cut up-and-down).

Cold cuts (which I don't really care for and rarely eat - once in a while I'll eat turkey or ham or maybe roast beef, but none of the "weird reprocessed" meats) are best on some kind of bread with character. Marbled rye is best, but it's hard to find good marbled rye here. And roast beef is best if there's a little steak sauce to put on it.

Pimiento cheese is best on very thin bread, either white or wheat. But it needs to be thin bread!

Grilled cheese can ONLY be made on white bread. It's kind of like pizza - you can't have a decent whole-wheat-crust pizza. (And I've tried. Oh, how I've tried. It's just not right. It's like whole wheat pasta - the health food types tell you it's just the same, it's just as good but it ISN'T. I'd rather eat pasta only once or twice a month and have the real, semolina, kind, instead of getting some kind of sandpapery imposter a couple times a week). And it should be JUST cheese - no tomatoes, no ham, no spinach (dear God - I once ordered a grilled cheese in a restaurant and they brought me a "grilled cheese Florentine" - it had all this pureed spinach crap on it. Now, don't get me wrong - spinach has its place - but that place is NOT on a grilled cheese sandwich, and ESPECIALLY when it says nowhere on the menu, "Your sandwich will come 'enhanced' with flabby cooked spinach in cream sauce.")

And NO MAYO! Can you believe that some people put mayo on a grilled cheese? I was traveling with my family (going to a family wedding) and we stopped at this fast-food chain place (Culvers, or somesuch) that's only found in the Upper Midwest. They had a "grilled cheese deluxe" on the menu. So I ordered it. It came with tomatoes (no biggie, I could pick those out), but the bread was slathered in mayonnaise. No! Wrong! Ick! At least WARN me first - if they have to put warning labels on frigging POPCORN, they should at least say somewhere on the menu: grilled cheese comes with bread soaked in mayo.

Not that I'm a total mayo-hater. It's good on turkey, it's a necessary component of egg salad, I've even been known to eat it on a hamburger. But it does not go with cheese. (Isn't there some kind of dietary law about that: "thou shalt not combine two sour dairy products in one sandwich"?)

But anyway. It was hot out, and I was starving (my family's travel MO is "drive until someone is near death from hunger/thirst/needing to pee, and THEN stop), and I will admit that even though I was in my 30s at the time, I did shed a few hot tears over the travesty that was that sandwich.

I was also once served a chili dog that had mustard on it. I consider that also to be deeply wrong. Fortunately, I was in a position to dump the dog and get something more edible in that case.

Yes, I am a profoundly picky eater.

So anyway. (And no - I am not "that" customer at the restaurant. I rarely if ever send things back. And I'm not the kind of person to make koo-koo special requests. All I ask is that I be told up front on the menu if there is some weird, unexpected ingredient that shouldn't be there. Like - if you're serving a grilled cheese sandwich with spinach on it, at the very LEAST call it "grilled cheese Florentine" on the menu, to cue your patrons in that they're in for a surprise.)

But back to packed lunches. Maybe yogurt's a little boring and predictable. And maybe the "100 calorie packs" are just the CYA of the processed food industry (or so some claim). But at least I can be sure of getting a mayonnaise-free and cooked-spinach-free lunch when I want one.