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Navigating the Food Desert

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Muffin_NIHYesh, so...the three restaurant meals I’ve consumed over the past two days have put almost two pounds back on the decrepit frame.

Why?

Three words:

salt
sugar
starch

Folks, we Americans don’t live in a food desert. No. We live on the freaking PLAINS OF MARS where food is concerned!

When you can go into a typical restaurant and find almost nothing on the menu that is not gonna be bad for you because of the way it’s been prepared and what was in the ingredients the cooks had to work with, you have virtually no chance of arriving at my age in good health. Not unless you prepare all your food at home, and most Americans wouldn’t think of any such thing because it just isn’t practical.

When you work eight or ten hours a day (or more, as many of us do), you still have to eat. Dragging a brown bag to the office every day isn’t much fun. But more to the point, if you’re a professional or a business executive, you are expected to make some rain. And you’re not making any rain when you’re parked in the lunchroom munching an egg salad sandwich.

You’re expected to take the clients to lunch. And if no client is handy, you’d still better show up at a restaurant or at the club and make yourself seen, and once a week you’d better be at a Chamber luncheon eating some bad Italian food served off a steam table while you glad-hand and schmooze. Your boss knows where you’re eating lunch…

And so you get in the habit of eating out. It’s so much easier than cooking, isn’t it? So you think, anyway. For a mere 25% over the inflated cost of the food, you get someone to wait on  you and pick up after you. How convenient!

So you eat out whether or not you have to entertain clients and shake hands with your competition colleagues and potential customers. You eat out because you’re too tired to cook. Because the kids want a Burger King and won’t eat whatever you put on the table. Because one of you got home late and the other one is about to expire from hunger. Because there’s nothing in the house to eat.

This morning I’m meeting two of my favorite friends for a shopping junket in old town Glendale, a venue graced with charming boutiques in fun antique buildings. They want to start at a restaurant where we can get a muffin (or some such) for breakfast and end at another restaurant where we’ll have lunch.

I am not eating any goddamn muffins. Let’s take a look at the ingredients of such an object, made from a mix, as most restaurant bakery goods are:

White flour
Sugar
Blueberries Canned In Light Syrup (Blueberries, Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup)
Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil
Modified Corn Starch
Vital Wheat Gluten
Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Propylene Glycol Monoesters of Fatty Acids
Mono and Diglycerides
Corn Starch
Maltodextrin
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate
Citric Acid
Cellulose Gum
Xanthan Gum
Artificial Flavor
Modified Cream

Yummy!

When you’re avoiding salt, what you’re really trying to avoid is sodium, because it drives up your blood pressure. “Salt” is the word we use in conversation for a compound called sodium chloride; the sodium part is the part we’d like to do without — whether some doctor told us to or not. You do need some sodium for good health. However, most unadulterated food has as much naturally occurring sodium as you need.

Take a look at that list:

Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate

Baking soda is high in sodium. In other words, what you’ve got there is sodium, sodium, sodium, and sodium. Probably about four times as much as you would need to bake your own blueberry muffins and have them come out tasting one helluva lot better than a concoction that needs artificial flavoring to make it convincing.

But this product is sweet, not salty! How does it get that way, with all that salty stuff in it? Well, it contains

Sugar
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Maltodextrin
Modified Corn Starch
Corn Starch

That would be sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar.

The undisguised sugar may be the best of a bad lot here. We’re told by the august authors of Wikipedia that “heated corn starch raises the blood glucose levels even faster than sugar, and like pure sugar, white bread and potatoes, it easily leads to excessive weight gain.” Which is to say that you don’t have to go far to learn what this stuff is gonna do to you.

If you were to make a batch of blueberry muffins from scratch — a project that would take maybe five minutes longer than pouring some water into a boxed mix would take — the result still wouldn’t be very good for you, but it would be a helluva lot better for you than the baked witch’s brew you’d be eating in a restaurant.

To start with, you’d use fresh or frozen blueberries, which come without benefit of high-fructose corn syrup.

Your only sweetener would be sugar, plus the fruit. At least you would then know what’s in the batter: you would know exactly how much sugar you were serving up.

You would use two sources of sodium: 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons baking soda. Here, too, you would know exactly how much of the stuff you were getting.

You would use 1/4 cup of butter, not hydrogenated oils, whose baleful effects are well known. You would add 1/3 cup of milk, not (yuck!) “modified” cream.

Ninety-nine percent of restaurants — especially the ubiquitous chain restaurants — serve up packaged, processed foods. Treats that wouldn’t be great for you to start with are downright toxic when they’re mixed up this way. Food that you imagine is healthy actually comes to you swimming in sugar, salt, and chemicals with unpronounceable names.

So…what to do?

It’s hard to say. When I go into a restaurant these days, I order a bowl of fruit. This noon I plan to ask for a salad — hold the dressing, hold the croutons — and then pull a recycled spice jar containing a mix of wine vinegar, olive oil, and fines herbes out of my purse. Otherwise? Try to get baked fish, broiled meat (not fried, which too often is what “grilled” means), and plain vegetables. Ask for salad with a cruet of vinegar and oil or a slice of lemon and a cruet of oil.

It takes the joy out of restaurant-going. But trust me: some doctor telling you that you need to swallow blood pressure pills until you topple over into the grave will take the joy out of life. So will a heart attack or a stroke.

This is the specific reason Americans are fat. It has nothing to do with people being lazy or slovenly or worthless or any other insult that the self-righteous sling at the overweight. It has everything to do with the kind of food that is being marketed to us — and what’s in it, largely without our understanding.

Image: U.S. National Institutes of Health. Public Domain.

How to Make a Stay-Cool Cold Pack

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So you pulled a muscle or put your back out and you think you’re gunna die of massive excruciating pain, and the doc or physical therapist tells you to use cold packs on it. Trouble with cold packs? They melt.

A favorite way to make a cold pack is to use a bag of frozen peas or corn. This is great, but a) peas and corn melt down into slush pretty quickly, and b) oh horror of frugal horrors, it wastes food!

I’ve been folding up a washcloth or several paper towels placing them flat inside a baggie, and sticking that in the freezer. This solves the food waste issue, but when you first take them out, they’re board-hard. After a few minutes the cloth or paper toweling will defrost enough to mold around the sore spot, and that is extremely nice…for about five minutes.

P1020446

The frozen washcloth gambit

Shortly, these gadgets warm right up to body temperature. Annoying.

Try this instead: dried beans. Get some bulk dried beans, such as pinto beans or peruanos — very cheap at any good ethnic store or even at Costco — put two or three cups into a ziplock bag, and freeze. The longer the better.

P1020444

Bean baggie!

After a few hours, apply the frozen beanbags to your aches and pains, in the usual mode.

Dried beans take longer to defrost than frozen peas or corn, and they also can be molded around a sore joint or limb. Lentils would work, too.

Remember to wear a T-shirt or wrap the bag in a kitchen towel to protect your skin from the cold. Don’t apply any extremely cold pack directly to your skin.

 

A Couple of Things I Can Afford to Do Without…

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1. New(er) Car

Toyota_Sienna_LEThe other day I picked up the Dog Chariot from Chuck, the Paragon of Mechanics. He charged me $300+ for a brake job and several other small details. I said I was thinking about replacing the tank with a Honda CR-V or a Toyota RAV-4. He and all the guys at the shop argued that the Chariot should run to 200,000 miles without major problems.

It only has 118,000 miles on it now. (“Only” 118,000 miles! Who would ever have thunk an American car owner would utter a phrase like that?)

Normally, I drive about 10,000 to 12,000 miles a year. Without the commute to various college campuses, the mileage is likelier to run on the low side than on the high side. So…if the Men of Chuck’s are right, the thing should last another 10 years!

Every day that car runs, it puts money in my pocket in the form of low insurance bills and negligible registration fees. If it actually survived another eight or ten years, a great deal of money could stay invested, rather than being engrossed by the various parasites who want to take it away from me.

I’d like to drive to the high country during the summers. But I’m not comfortable driving the aging Sienna up the rim, which is a steep climb, nor do I relish being stuck by the side of the road way to hell and gone out in the desert. But duh! It would cost a lot less than Arizona’s $420 registration fee to rent a car and drive it to Jerome or Flagstaff. What the heck? I could rent a Mercedes convertible for less than it costs to register a $25,000 car in Arizona! And not have to pay 25 grand for the privilege.

Yesterday morning I took the little tank by the annoying car wash (at Chuck’s behest: “Take it to the car wash!!!!!”) and paid their demand for an extra $4 to dust the interior. Therein lies the key: give them some vigorish and they do a decent job.

The clunk came out looking almost like a brand-new chariot! Very nice.

So I decided to touch up the paint on the two spots where the white enamel chipped off, one where either a rock or a BB hit the tailgate and another where I broke the tail-light and chipped off a little paint around the assembly. The trick (I learned after I left the tailgate open while backing into the garage and whacked it on the garage door) is to squirt a couple of light coats of white enamel spray paint over the nekkid metal ding. It worked, more or less…good enough for government work, anyway.

custom_paint_jobContemplating another eight or ten years of living with this contraption, it occurred to me to wonder if it would be worth having the clunk repainted.

I’ve always wanted a candy-apple red car. How cool would a candy-apple red Sienna be, anyway? Maybe with some nice yellow and orange flames along the sides?

2) Overcomplicated Decomplication Strategy

Several readers remarked, in puzzled tones, that my scheme to cut the number of credit-card charges to keep track of, month in and month out, was effectively self-defeating. They noted, for example, that buying a cash card for a grocery store would not be regarded as a charge for groceries but rather as a charge for a piece of plastic, counterproductive when the Costco AMEX kicks back 6% on charges for food, 3% on gasoline purchases, and 1% on everything else. Presumably a piece of plastic would come under the rubric of “everything else.”

Much more obvious strategy: cut the number of trips to the usual suspects among retailers. Where is it written that I have to jet off to the Safeway every time I notice that one or two small items have run out? Can one not make do for a few days?

Why not simply cut the number of trips to Costco to two a month (max)? And the trips to Safeway to four a month? Every Thursday morning, I drive right past the favored Safeway on the way home from the weekly networking meeting. Stopping for groceries then would serve two purposes: a) save gasoline by combining trips and b) reduce the number of visits to the supermarket.

Two Costco charges + four Safeway charges + three Costco gas fillups ≠ 98 gerjillion annoying little charges. Actually, they = nine charges.

What if I took out about $200 or $300 in cash each month, and paid any bills under $20 to $30 with actual dollars? Here in this stack of charge slips I see a $4.16 charge to Safeway, a $10.73 charge to a restaurant, a $12.39 charge to Trader Joe’s, a $19.05 charge to the propane dealer, and on and on.

If only Costco gas bills and bills over $30 were charged, last month’s number of transactions would drop from twenty-eight to to twelve. If the threshold were $50, then the number of charges made last month would have been seven. And if I limited Safeway trips to once a week and Costco expeditions to twice a month, the number might drop even further.

So. The new Decomplication Strategy: Use cash for purchases under $50; limit routine shopping junkets to specific days of the month.

Decomplicate Me!

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Ohhhhhh gawd one more piece of paper to have to figure out, act on, and file is gonna break my achin’ back! Yesterday afternoon I was trying to figure out how to organize the usual complicated mess before handing it over to The Accountant from Nirvana, who offers to take on the migrainish bookkeeping. Obviously, the less mess for her to have to plow through, the fewer hours it will take her to beat it back. Hence: decomplication.

So much paper comes pouring into my house that often I just can’t keep up with it. It piles up like dust on the Plains until finally I’m forced to deal with it, and that dealing can take the better part of an entire day. Yesterday, I thought if only i could find a way to cut the number of transactions and the number of pieces of paper i have to screw with, maybe it wouldn’t take half my lifetime to keep this shit under control…

One spring that feeds the flood of papers is the charge cards. Specifically, the AMEX card. Costco’s American Express card is one of America’s premier kick-back cards: almost every charge racks up a few pennies or a few dollars toward the annual “rebate,” which in my case goes directly into savings. Because I charge everything on the AMEX card and then pay it off at the end of each month, some years that kickback has amounted to three or four hundred dollars. To make that happen, though, entails snowflurries of charge slips, each of which has to be entered in Quickbooks.

Most of these small charges, some as small as a couple of bucks, occur at a limited number of retailers: Costco, Safeway, Costco gas, AJ’s (a local purveyor of fancy groceries and the best coffee beans in town).

What if…? What if I were to buy cash cards at the places where most of my charges take place? You can buy cash cards at Costco with which to purchase gasoline and groceries. Ditto Safeway: give yourself a gift card. Same at the local upscale AJ’s. A person could pay for these things with the richly endowed AMEX card, thereby preserving the coveted kickback.

Wouldn’t it make sense to buy gift cards or cash cards to cover purchases at the most-frequented retailers, thereby consolidating 87 gerjillion receipts into three or four?

If said person then paid for purchases under about $50 with cash, wouldn’t that also get rid of a lot of ditzy little receipts to keep track of?

Then how much would be left to charge on credit cards, track, and organize monthly payments for?

Hm.

Averaging charges in various categories over seven months, I discovered that typically I’ve been spending about $55 a month at AJ’s, $300 at Costco on groceries and household goods, $95 on Costco gasoline, $120 at Safeway, and around $160 on small sundries. On average, large planned or unplanned bills can come to as much as $370 in any given month.

What if the only things that went on the charge card were gift or cash cards and large bills? And all the little stuff were paid in cash?

This would hugely change the budgeting scheme. Instead of $1100 a month to be charged on the card and paid off at the end of each month, things would look like this:

CashBudget

Biggest drawback: it would require me to traipse to the credit union once a month and get actual cash, of all things…

On the first day of each budget cycle:

1. Drive to the credit union; withdraw $160
2. Drive to Costco: Buy $395 Costco cash card ($95 for gasoline; $300 for in-store purchases).
3. Drive to Safeway, get $120 Safeway cash card.
4. Drive to AJ’s, get $55 AJ’s card.

Manage funds accordingly.

This would consolidate all the charges for groceries, cleaning goods, personal care products, and household stuff into three charges — Costco, Safeway, and AJ’s. Gasoline and some clothing would also be comprised in the Costco card. There would be no reason to itemize every single stupid little charge in these categories; instead, all that would be noted is the cost of an estimated month’s worth of charges, to be paid with a cash card.   Same would be true of the ditzy little bills, 50 bucks and under, that would be paid for in cash.

The only bills requiring serious itemization would be bigger-ticket items such as major car repair bills, gifts, dental visits, and the like.

Right there, dozens of scraps of paper, direct to the trash! Or at least not stashed in a file folder or envelope to be inflicted on the (expensive!) accountant.

Today, speaking of major bills, I have to leave my car at the shop for a brake job, so I won’t be driving around buying cash cards and extracting cash from the credit union. But tomorrow…

 

Warning: Toxic Cooking Utensils!

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Wanna feel your jaw drop to the floor? Check out this label that came in the wrapping of two pair of cooking tongs purchased at Target:

P1020160

Got that? In case any of us is vision-impaired, let’s try that again, bf/cc/clc:

WARNING: Handling of the plastic used in this product may expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use.

Now you’ve got it, right? We’re talking about cooking tongs, the gadgets you use to flip chicken in the frying pan, to flip steak on the barbecue, to toss salad at the table. The only plastic on the things is a coating smeared all over the handles.

Even though this little caveat is in plain sight, I didn’t notice it while I was inside the Target store shopping for old-fashioned hinged tongs. It’s tucked away on the back side of the packaging, and of course one is careful to display the merchandise with the front of the packaging showing. I just grabbed it off the rack and ran. The “plastic” mentioned here is a kind of tacky surface, white on one pair and black on the other, applied to the handles of these tongs, presumably to make it easier to manipulate them. The old tongs we used to get in the grocery store had no plastic goop on them — they were just plain stainless steel. They worked just fine. No one needed or asked to have the handles dipped in a vat of lead-laced plastic. But apparently if it ain’t broke, we have to fix it.

Now I’ll have to take these things back. Like I had nothing to do but traipse to Target. Over and over and over again…

It’s beginning to look a lot like they don’t make plain boring scissors-style stainless tongs anymore. They all have some degree of coating on them, though to what extent its nature may be poisonous is unknown — at least, so it goes at Amazon. That means eventually I’ll be reduced to having to get used to the now ubiquitous tweezer-type tongs, which I hate but which at least can still be had sans stupid coatings. Aggravating.

Can you imagine? A freaking cooking utensil, coated with a toxic substance. In an American store that one would presume would come up to American safety standards. Get used to it, indeed: in the brave new world of globalization, if the Chinese, denizens of one of the most polluted countries on earth, will put up with it, you get to put up with it.

FlickingLemonOilAnother aggravation: English Lemon Oil for furniture has disappeared from the market. The only oil-type rub-0n furniture polishes still available are Old English and, in a very few places, Weiman’s. Old English lemon oil, my preference, is still available at Amazon, for 16-ounce prices ranging from $3.49 to $8.47. This once commonplace item no longer appears on retailers’ shelves. Period. I’ve been to Target, Safeway, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walgreen’s, and Ace. Lo! no more Old English lemon oil, screw you very much. So now, having wasted a great deal of gas in the search, I’ll have to dork around with ordering it online.

Ridiculouser and ridiculouser.

 

 

{Grump!!!}

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Spent half the morning compiling a round-up, interrupted about every thirty minutes by one or the other…interruption. Hit “publish” and…FOOP! Disappeared the damn thing.

Apparently I hit “Move to Trash.” And there’s no “Trash” link anywhere to be found in the dashboard. Jesse the Wonder-Guru is going to try to resurrect the thing. Later.

All of which makes me exceptionally crabby.

In brief, the one thing I really need to get online today: Many thanks to Miss Thrifty for hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and kindly including Funny’s squib on the art and business of panhandling. Love the Dr. Faustus theme!

Meanwhile…If you’d asked me I would’ve told you:

• The new J. Jill collection is weirdly reminiscent of the Sears clothing I knew and loathed during my misspent childhood: everything looks like your mother made it from Simplicity or Vogue patterns.

• We’re a day late and a dollar short in figuring out that the pending demand for long-term care is about to take this country on a skateboard ride to Hell.

• I love our cops. But I sure do hate cop helicopters buzzing our houses and being routed back and forth over residential neighborhoods all the time.

• Man is the noisiest animal.

• Being lured into buying stuff from some retailer is not the same as loyalty.

• Our brave new world gets creepier and creepier by the day. Make that “by the minute.”

• News about movie actors and rock stars bores me witless.

• Every time I hear another story about the Great Desert University I’m sooooo glad I don’t work there anymore!

• People who let their dogs run loose in public parks — especially when the dogs are chihuahuas and the parks are home to coyotes and rattlesnakes — are dumber than posts.

• There’s a special place in Hell for parents who give their kids weird names. Demons will torment them by forcing them, into eternity,  to spell their children’s bizarrely mispronounced monikers.

• Styrofoam is the world’s most annoying substance with which to make cups and plates. I’m pretty suspicious of it as insulation, too.

• Houses covered with stucco look like they’re deliberately engineered to look shabby in 10 or 12 years.

• The word “multiple” makes users sound like they’re speaking with their mouths full. And using the word to mean “two” or “a few” is just plain affected.

• Elected leaders who think it’s their government’s place to tell citizens how much soda pop they can drink lead me to wonder who on earth elected them in the first place.

• Chocolate is good for your health.

• Wine is good for your health.

• Working is bad for your health.