Obesity Epidemic Extends to Inanimate Objects

I’m speaking specifically about cars, but the premise can apply to just about any object—especially TVs.

Reveling in the light “wombat hour” traffic last Saturday afternoon, and comparing it with the typical going-home traffic of yesterday, I noticed quite a few things:

• Nearly all the cars in traffic were carrying single occupants

• Most of the cars were distinctly oversized for carrying the lone occupant

• Traffic moved slower than it did when gas was under $3.00/gallon—it took more lights to get through an intersection

Now I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that when fuel tends to tighten the noose around your cost-of-living neck, you’d somehow take some sort of evasive action to sidestep it…right? I didn’t see much of it going on around here.

Night after night, the news channels all proudly broadcast people either crying at the pump, or those looking for a working pump to cry at. Yet none of these people has apparently come to the conclusion that the cost of living, including driving, is going up, never to settle back down to lower levels again. No evasive action maneuvers are being taken, because it’s so much easier to cry and complain on TV.

Do we really need a flat screen TV that takes up an entire wall of our living rooms? Do we really need that monster truck or 8-cylinder car for commuting to work and back? We have reached the My Big Fat Inanimate Object point when it comes to our personal possessions. What was ever wrong with a regular 4-cylinder car, a regular 21” TV screen WITHOUT surround sound, a regular 250-300 cc motorcycle, cell phones that just relayed calls, pocket-sized electronic game players, and the good ol’ Walkman?

Technology, supposedly ushered into our lives to make them easier, has made us slaves to the megawatt, the megabyte, and the price per gallon. Now, more technology is being invented to relieve us from the pain of the current technologies.

Let me paint this picture for you: when you’re dieting, do you super-size your fries, purchase fries from an alternative source, or wail publicly about the calorie content until Congress gets involved? No--you simply don’t eat the fries any more. Now, apply this analogy to oil, electronics, and anything else you purchase and use in “My Big Fat” proportions.

We are standing at a precipice of cost of future living vs. cost of buying decisions, and some of us will go over the edge from our own largesse. It’s time to back away from that ledge, and away from the “savior” technology. Pay levels are NOT going to rise for hourly workers*, and they’re the ones on the teetering edge—the most vulnerable to price spikes and shocks, and the loudest complainers about them. It’s time to take a hard look at lifestyles and what is going to go into maintaining them—can you afford this going into the future? Without a drastic change in income, my guess is no.

The solution—cut the fat. Your cars, your TVs and other electronic gizmos, and whatever else you have that supposedly makes your life push-button easy is all fair game here. Maintenance costs, replacement costs, and new manufacturing costs are all going to continue to rise into the future and beyond, so you may as well get used to living a lifestyle you’ll be able to afford for years to come NOW. Right at this moment, even the wealthy are shaking in their boots over rising prices, debt, and health care costs, so you aren’t alone in uncertainty about the future. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Trim your inanimate object fat, and let someone else cover the costs of upkeep and replacement. Bigger, smaller (in the case of MP-3 players and cell phones), or more capabilities does not mean a better object—it just means more in costs, hassles and headache, and fewer tears for you down the road.

If the price of something seems cheap today, this means the future costs are going to be dear.
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*Footnote: a spokesman for the firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas says that employers are going to continue seeking the lowest wage point for work until something better comes along to save labor costs. I saw this on CNBC, and am still seeking a direct link to his commentary.

16 Kids to Feed, and Not a Price Book in Sight

Yep, you can tell I managed to stay up late enough last night to watch another nauseating installment of The Duggar Family's adventures in house-building, grocery shopping, and baby-brewing. I did make some observations, however:

1. Their bedroom-sized pantry clearly wasn't filled using a price book, a warehouse store, and I venture to guess no coupons were used in the making of that room.

2. I'm not going to go to the place where people breed indisciminately just because they can.

3. Mother Duggar has let go and delegated a whole lot of typical housewife control issues--she has surrendered herself to the crowd of children, and anyone from 12 on up is now running the kitchen, laundry, housecleaning, car repair, and smaller children. Judging by her pantry stock, freezers included, she has also let go of (or never had grasp of) basic cost-per-serving principles.

4. They may be debt-free (the ONLY saving grace here), but I bet they still receive and rely on some sort of public assistance, because the only working parent in that family has a commission-based job--we all know how unreliable that income can be!

5. Obviously nobody thought far enough ahead to consider things like college, retirement, major medical, or even an emergency savings account. How could one when there are 16 mouths to feed and keep quiet? Just thinking about tomorrow can be too much, I bet.

Okay--enough nit-picking at the Duggars in general. I'm only interested in their grocery shopping habits and how they could spend a whole lot less than $1200/week to feed their village.

Why on earth go shopping at the neighborhood Stop-n-Slop when they could save a lot by going to a warehouse store and buying in larger quantities per container, keeping a price book for those things they can't or won't buy in commercial-sized containers, and/or having a garden somewhere on that 22-acre plot they just bought and built on? With 16 kids to plant, weed, and harvest, there really is no excuse NOT to!

I also was keenly aware that this family is doing what every other pressured family in America does: relies on poor nutrition to get them through the checkout lane. I'd like to see that health consultant from "Honey, We're Killing the Kids" to go over and peruse the offerings of the Duggar pantry--even though none of the family shows any signs of obesity, they do suffer from low nutrient intake from a lack of fresh foods. Everything the Duggars ate except meat came from a can, jar, or box. I didn't see any truly honest scratch cooking of any kind going on in that cramped kitchen. This tells me that those girls (and boys) aren't learning how to cook from scratch, and will go out into the world eating from cans just like at home.

Boy, what I could do for them with a pantry/shopping skills makeover. If I had Amy D's phone number, I'd have her call Mrs. Duggar and give her an education in frugality. I wonder if Amy watches the show...surely, she'd flip out of she did.

“Honey, Not Only Are We Killing the Kids, But When Was the Last Time You Looked in the Mirror?”

Hats off to TLC for putting an embarrassingly human face on the obesity epidemic in America, starting with the kids. Rubbing the parent’s noses in it on TV will do the same for them as the “nanny” shows did for unruly child behavior on the network channels.

The Young family, the first chosen victims of this public nutritional chastisement, had a lot of changes to make: cutting down on sugar, incorporating fruits and vegetables into their diet, and removing TV from many rooms in the house. It was a shock to them to see how much improvement they made in their family life in just three weeks.

I immediately have two questions:

1. Did the family keep this new regimen up after the cameras were turned off and all those pesky TV people went home?

2. Did the parents bother to take a hard look at themselves, who are largely to blame for bringing such garbage into the house in the FIRST place?

Question one we will never know the answer to unless this show plans on doing a retrospective and follow-up. As for question two, part of the answer is “of course not.” Obviously, the mother in this first show had a serious obesity problem herself, judging by the fact that her neck was bigger around than my thigh. The father may have been overweight too, but it didn’t appear that way on camera.

As for TLC, I wonder when they’re going to get around to showing how we’re killing ourselves and our children by sodium overdose. Salt is just as much a danger to our health as sugar consumption is.

Mirrors play cruel tricks on us—that’s why we either ignore them, or have them strategically placed high enough on the wall for grooming purposes from the neck up. That way, we don’t have to face our physical disgust from head to toe, and learn what cruel tricks our brains have been playing on us this whole time.

Mrs. Young, I hope you get some help for yourself soon. If you don’t, you may be dead in a couple of years, leaving your house full of men without a wife and mother. All you need to do for starters is what you’re doing for the boys—changing food habits and limiting TV. If you add some walking to that food regimen, you will be doing enough to rescue yourself from the brink. Imagine those TLC crews showing YOU a shot of what you’d look like in 20 years without lifestyle changes, then with them—chances are good they couldn’t come up with a shot of you without the changes, because you’d be dead.

You may not be aware of what you look like, because I bet all the mirrors are too high for you to see it all. Keep eating right, keep walking, and have hubby lower those mirrors (or install new ones) so you can see the results as you shrink.

As the narrator in the show says, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Be a better tree for your apples, Mrs. Young, and all the other “Mrs. Youngs” out there. For years, you’ve given in to the kids’ demands, and used junk food, toys, and concessions to shut them up—now it’s time to take back control, of both behavior and diet. These kids are not going away any time soon, so you might as well learn to make them acceptable to you and society.

Stop covering up the root of this family problem with muumuus, turtleneck sweaters, and too-tall mirrors and get to work! Be an example of what can be done for yourself and your boys.

Some Off-the-Cuff Frugal Tips for Special Diets

I just couldn't get myself to calm down enough to write this on Word first, make it pretty, then transfer it to this blog--I'm writing directly on Blogger this morning.
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My husband and I are slowly making a transition from a relatively normal low-sodium diet to one that's wheat- and gluten-free as well. Since undertaking a week of the Elimination Diet, I have discovered that I have a problem with wheat, oats, and gluten.

We've already given up salt and most dairy around here (Hubby has a cheese obsession, but I've been a good girl). I use coconut milk in place of cow's milk for baking, adding "good" fat to the mix along with the liquid.

These are some things I've found while muddling through transition to a nearly-Celiac diet--

Flours: if you aren't aware that individual flours exist to replace wheat flour (and the gluten therein), go check out your nearest health food store. For frugality's sake, check out Chinese markets for rice flour and all the rice byproducts (polish, bran, brown rice flour).

Eggs: Hubby has an egg allergy, and I've been hunting high and low for something other than chicken eggs to try on him. Duck eggs through the internet cost $44/dozen, without shipping charges, so I never pursued it. Guess what? The Chinese market saves me once again with a local source for duck eggs, and they're a darn sight cheaper than $44/dozen.

Low-sodium baking soda: I never realized just how much sodium is in baking soda and baking powder, and never cared about it. One teaspoon of this stuff will shock you into a stroke! Like a willing accomplice, I ordered some low sodium stuff from the web, and now regret it. Here's why: the jar I received says it has CALCIUM CARBONATE for the ingredient, and that's all. For frugality's sake, go get your calcium carbonate baking soda from your nearest local drug store--they carry it behind the pharmacy counter already bottled. The price I paid for this stuff compared to Drug-O-Rama is killing me!

Before making a pre-manufactured bread commitment: If you are like me and have no room for a breadmaker, much less rolling out dough, you might be looking at pre-made breads for your gluten-free diet (frozen or not). Some GF bread sites offer samples of their product (Ener-G offers a two-slice packet of every bread it makes), and it pays to order those before making a bread commitment. I ordered some of their low-sodium samples (trying to find a bread that both hubby and I could eat), and found a couple of types that taste and feel like eating the kitchen sponge! I'm just glad I didn't go ahead and order the actual bread at this point--I would've been sorely disappointed, and the birds around here would've been in for an expensive treat.

After several cake and pancake failures: GF baking is different from regular wheat-laden baking because of the lack of gluten, which makes batter rise. When my GF Gourmet book arrived yesterday, I found out what I was doing wrong and how to continue baking from the hip with these simple changes--add an additional egg, triple my baking soda/powder, watch my flour substitutions, and bake longer at slightly lower temperatures.

I'm pleased to announce that I finally have pancakes and cakes that aren't raw in the middle and/or paper-thin (or nearly so).

A word about flour shopping: don't forget the price book rules when comparing flour prices--price it out per pound, keep track of it, and go for the lowest-priced one(s). Rice flour is rice flour, soy flour is soy flour, and tapioca flour is tapioca flour. Brand doesn't matter, nor does size, and don't get caught up in Bob's Red Mill-sized bags that fit in your canister bag and all, like I did. Besides, you will learn that these kinds of flour are NOT shelf-stable and must be refrigerated or frozen--so much for fitting in my canister!

If making the transition to a GF diet like me, it pays (or saves) to go into Celiac websites and chatrooms. In my case, it also paid to know what is carried behind the pharmacy counter, ripe for the asking (I make my own cat food and use calcium carbonate powder already). While not a Celiac, I did learn a few things about how REAL people deal with their potentially life-threatening allergies and intolerances to wheat and gluten.

That's about all I can think of for now about my ongoing GF odyssey.

UPDATE: Now, I have another couple of suggestions that might help you save some money as well as time and effort when trying to support a special diet: Celiac and Autism sites, and pre-mixed flours.

A Celiac diet eliminates wheat, gluten, and wheat-like grains from recipes, and an Autism diet eliminates even MORE allergens from recipes, doing away with the mental product substitution we all do in the kitchen. The pre-mixed flours will eliminate having to buy several kinds of individual flours that will sit around in your fridge, taking up prime real estate. Besides, they cost the same as the regular alternative-grain flour bags (at least in MY health food store!). I plan to buy a case of 4 bags (22 oz. each), dump 'em in my now-empty flour canister, and put THAT in my fridge!

I spent 7 hours on the web yesterday trying to find useable wheat- and gluten-free cake recies that were just basic cake--nothing on fire, no booze-drenched recipes, no multiple layers of fruit and whipped cream, and no frosting required. Just basic sheet cake. I found about 4 that I could use. Apparently, layer cakes are all the rage in gluten-free baking--this is not good for sending to work with hubby to feed 24 hungry co-workers.

After searching using "gluten-free cakes" as my parameter, I then moved onto "allergy-free baking" and found tons of autism websites with loads of useable recipes (even sheet cake ones): no gluten or wheat, no dairy, no eggs, no salt, no peanuts, no sugar or artificial sweetners, and so on. It would seem that between hubby's problems and mine, we almost make up one autistic person without the mental side-effects. If you're into good healthy baking without added nonsense or potentially allergenic ingredients, autism baking is your world. Also, these recipes have the added benefit of being kid-approved, and most get fed to the entire family on a regular basis (or so the comments after each recipe say).

Anyway, an added tip to frugal special diet baking is this: if you seek to avoid more than just one or two allergens with a minimum of special ingredients that the whole family can enjoy, go check out autism sites and persue their recipe sections. I'm glad I did. Thank you, Google.

From the “Old and Dusty” Files: Just How Much Meat is On That Pizza?

Some years ago, I saw an interesting and eyebrow-raising story in the Virginian-Pilot about our government relaxing rules for the amount of meat on each frozen pizza (sorry, no link to story—the paper didn’t have a website at the time):

From the Front Page section, by Philip Brasher of AP (smarmy comments in parentheses are mine)—

Government Tries to Toss the Rules For Frozen Pizza
Hold the pepperoni. The government wants to drop the decades-old rules that dictate the ingredients of frozen pizzas, down to how much meat, sausage, or pepperoni must be on the toppings. Kraft and other pizza makers say the rules prevent them from lowering the fat content (yeah, RIGHT!) or trying out new ethnic styles.

Under the Department of Agriculture's regulations, a meat pizza must have a crust, a tomato-based sauce, and at least 10-12% meat by weight. A 12-inch pepperoni would typically have about 20 pepperoni slices.

The rules, known as standards of identity, were intended in part to promote consumption of meat and cheese, said consumer advocate Carol Tucker Foreman, who oversaw the department's food regulation during the Carter Administration. "That doesn't make sense in today's society," she said.

There are other similar identity standards for a variety of other foods, like chili and stew.

The department will take public comment until January 2 on its proposal to eliminate the pizza standards. Without those rules, a meat or sausage pizza could have as little as 2% meat. That's the minimum content for anything labeled as a meat product. (Do I smell instant profit here?)

Restaurant and delivery pizzas are exempt from the rules. And under the federal government's system for regulating food, the USDA regulations don't apply to vegetable or cheese pizzas. Meatless products fall under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration, which has no identity standards for pizza.

Frozen pizza is a booming business, thanks to the development of self-rising dough (Doesn't ALL dough self-rise? They just learned how NOT to cook it thoroughly before freezing and packaging it). Kraft Foods, maker of DiGiorno and Tombstone brands, has seen its pizza sales balloon from $190 million to $1 billion annually over the past decade. But frozen pizza still only accounts for a small fraction of the $30 billion in total U.S. pizza sales.

"The rules are outdated. The frozen pizza business has changed dramatically," says Tony Mantuano, chef at Chicago's Spiagggia restaurant and consultant to Schwan's Sales Enterprises, makers of Freschetta pizza. "One of our most popular pizzas is a pizza that has duck sausage and goat cheese. There's no tomato sauce, and no mozarella." (Okay, Tony--I'm all for VARIETY, just not a 10% reduction in the amount of actual meat one uses!)

His definition of a pizza: "It has to have a great crust. What you put on top is what tastes great and what people want to eat. That's it." (Does that include TVP and/or soy products in place of real meat, Tony?)

"If the USDA drops its rules, pizza makers can cut out some of the meat and experiment with toppings such as pesto or alfredo sauce," says Jaye Neagle, senior director of R&D for Kraft's pizza division.

A cynical consumer might wonder whether the pizza makers' real motive in seeking to get rid of the meat standard is to pad their profits, not trim America's waistlines (like me, for example). Not so, say industry officials.

"Consumers won't buy what they don't like," said Robert Garfield, executive director of the National Frozen Pizza Institute (oh YEAH? What about want creation, hmmm?). "These companies aren't looking for a one-shot deal. they're looking for customers who will try their product and try again." (I tried it, and now I make my own pizzas for this very reason)

A Blast from the Past: Portion Control and Cost Per Serving

As more and more of us grow more and more obese, inflation continues to beat us about the head and shoulders relentlessly, and we get waylaid by rollercoaster gas prices, the simple concepts of portion control and cost per serving inevitably get put on the back burner, if they ever even make it to the stovetop.

An effective way to help you help yourself against the onslaught of all three foes (obesity, inflation, and gas prices) is to learn to practice the lost arts of portion control and calculating cost per serving.

In the case of most foods, a single serving size consists of ½ cup (except meats—consult the package nutrition label on the back for accuracy). The Food Guide Pyramid gives us a general idea of proper serving sizes in separate food categories to attain the “ideal” 2000 calories/day, and for most foods, it is ½ cup.

In the case of dehydrated foods such as beans, pastas, oatmeal, and rice, you have a distinct advantage: the dehydrated foods double or triple when cooked, so you use even less than a standard ½ cup measure to achieve the recommended ½ cup cooked serving.

When calculating the cost per serving of a food item (excluding meats), you divide the price by the number of servings obtained from that particular package. Simply buying the best available price per unit on any item isn’t enough—you have to know how much food this item will provide you once it is fully prepared for serving.

The object is to get the most servings for the least cost per serving.

To calculate cost per serving, find out how much constitutes one serving of that particular foodstuff, and how many servings that foodstuff will yield you. Divide the item’s price by the number of servings you will get out of it, and this will give you the cost per serving. With dehydrated foods, there is a big catch.

The catch to dehydrated foods: because you get two or three times the amount of food out if the item when it’s cooked, you need to calculate based on COOKED yield and not dry yield.

Example: let’s say you stumbled upon a display of brown rice. A 2-lb. bag costs $1.25, and you get 8 dry servings of ½ cup each from that bag, equaling .15625 (or .16) per dry serving. But we don’t eat dry rice, do we?

Since rice (at least) doubles, a single ½ cup dry serving will yield you 1 cup of cooked rice. In other words, that 2-lb. bag of rice actually yields you 16 servings of dry rice when used in ¼ cup measurements (which makes the recommended ½ cup serving per person).

Now you know the bag of rice will yield you 16 servings COOKED. As we do eat cooked rice, you can divide the price of the bag by 16 to get the cost per serving of COOKED, useable rice.

$1.25 divided by 16 = .078125 or .08 per serving of cooked brown rice

Now that you’ve learned how to calculate the cost per serving of foods other than meat, you can start making better buying decisions using less time and money to do it. With better portion control, your food will go even farther, allowing you to make fewer shopping trips and fewer calories get packed away for storage in your body.

Eating at home really DOES cost less than eating out when you stop to calculate your food costs per serving instead of per unit or per item. Many times, you will find that home cooking and careful purchasing yields many meals at $1.00/plate or less (excluding organic foods). You certainly can’t eat out for that price! As it turns out, Mom’s Diner (a.k.a. home) is the cheapest, most nutritious place on earth to eat.

Meat is a whole different story, and for that, I’ll gladly guide you to some expert help:

cheap cooking

Wegman's buying guide

VT extension office (scroll down until you see meat buying tips)

I’ll just leave you with some tips—the more bones, gristle, waste, and hollow carcasses the meat product contains, the more you pay per serving. Although boneless cuts seems expensive to you, they’re actually the best buy in the meat department because of their distinct lack of waste. Rubber Chicken and all of the offshoot recipes for lesser cuts and leftover carcass parts amounts to a lot of work to salvage a very little bit of meat, and you’d have to do it to help recoup the cost of that per serving price!

Another piece of advice: frozen whole birds have ice inside and throughout the carcass, making them weigh more at the register—why pay for ice when all you want is the meat? Buy fresh when you can.

Knowing this, you might want to start re-thinking holiday turkeys, holiday hams, and any other “tradition” meat that’s full of bones and/or has a hollow carcass. For an alternative, look into turkey thighs—more meat and less bone per person than a whole turkey, or even turkey legs.