"Grow it yourself Plan a farm garden now."

From Wikipedia:

Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. They were used along with Rationing Stamps and Cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply. Besides indirectly aiding the war effort, these gardens were also considered a civil "morale booster" in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. This made victory gardens a part of daily life on the home front.

Title: Grow it yourself Plan a farm garden now.
Creator(s): Bayer, Herbert, 1900-1985, artist
Related Names:
   United States. Rural Electrification Administration , sponsor
Date Created/Published: NYC : NYC WPA War Services, [between 1941 and 1943]
Medium: 1 print (poster) : silkscreen, color.
Summary: Poster for the U.S. Department of Agriculture promoting victory gardens, showing carrots, lettuce, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes growing.

"The Children Must Learn"

Fascinating little covering circa 1940 views of nutrition, education and rural poverty.




Two of the comments were worth noting

Reviewer: roncox -  - September 8, 2011
Subject: My sister and her family
This film is of my sister Nellie and her family. Mr. and Mrs. Marion Lynch with their children, Norma Doris, Winnona and Harold D.. The couple on the porch is Marion's parents Dudley P. and Mary Lynch. This is the Lynchtown School at Drip Rock KY.

Reviewer: juanita lynch -  - September 5, 2011
Subject: My Family
Despite the economic hardships of the era in which they lived, my parents, Marion and Nellie Lynch were hard working, honest people who always had a sense of dignity and pride which they passed on to all their children. This documentary is very special and I am so thankful to have them as my parents. Thank you to all who have made this possible.

Fans of classic films like the Hustler may also recognize the voice of the narrator, Myron McCormick.


Children Must Learn, The
by Educational Film Institute of New York University and Documentary Film Productions, Inc.

Published 1940
Usage Public Domain
Topics Education, Appalachia, Rural America


Educating the children of Appalachia.
Director: Willard Van Dyke.
Script: Spencer Pollard.
Photography: Bob Churchill.
Narration: Myron McCormick.
Editor: Irving Lerner.
Music: Fred Stewart.


Run time 12:34
Producer Educational Film Institute of New York University and Documentary Film Productions, Inc.
Sponsor Sloan (Alfred P.) Foundation

Wow, I had no idea Grape-Nuts could do that

Advertisement for Grape-Nuts cereal 1900

1900 was kind of the golden age for ludicrous food claims, but we are trying to catch up.

American Agriculture Movement pins from the Smithsonian

I tend to be distrustful of protest movements. They make a lot of noise, but when the dust settles, the results are mainly cathartic, and I have remarkably little interest in other people's catharsis.

American Agriculture Political Pin

MEASUREMENTS:
overall: 3 in; 7.62 cm
OBJECT NAME:
button
SUBJECT:
Agriculture
CREDIT LINE:
Gift of Clifford Hamilton
ID NUMBER:
1993.0188.010
ACCESSION NUMBER:
1993.0188
CATALOG NUMBER:
1993.0188.010
DESCRIPTION:
The American Agriculture Movement was started in the fall of 1977 in response to the 1977 Farm Bill which had the adverse affect of dropping commodity prices to a level lower than the cost of production. President Jimmy Carter’s agricultural policies were considered detrimental to the American farmer by many members of the American Agriculture Movement. Here newscaster David Brinkley is seen pulling President Carter’s strings as if President Carter was his puppet. President Carter, as well as his cabinet officers, were often vilified for their ineffective policies.

The American Agriculture Movement was started in the fall of 1977 in response to the 1977 Farm Bill which had the adverse affect of dropping commodity prices to a level lower than the cost of production. In February of 1979, members of the American Agriculture Movement organized a tractorcade, a protest on tractors, in Washington, D.C. Farmers from around the country, some driving from more than 1500 miles away, arrived by the thousands. On February 5, they convened in Washington, D.C. from four different directions. In order to accommodate both the protesters and the city’s residents, the D.C. police required them to park on the National Mall and restricted their protests to specific times during the day.

Not exactly a food ad, but still too tacky to be forgotten

Virginia Slims (from the good people at Phillip Morris)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the themes of feminism and women's liberation, with the slogan "You've Come A Long Way, Baby" were often used in the ads, and often featured anecdotes about women in the early 20th century who were punished for being caught smoking, usually by their husbands or other men, as compared to the time of the ads when more women had equal rights, usually comparing smoking to things like the right to vote

Captain Tootsie -- a spokeshero goes mainstream

In the Golden Age of Comics, regular readers saw a lot of Captain Tootsie

Captain Tootsie is an advertisement comic strip created for Tootsie Rolls in 1943 by C C Beck, Peter Costanza and Bill Schreider (1950 onwards). It featured the title character Captain Tootsie and his sidekick, a boy named Rollo, and two other young cohorts named Fatso and Fisty. It had stories in the form of full color one-page Sunday strips, black and white daily strips, and two issues of a comic book of the same title released by Toby Press. The advertisement comic was featured by many publishers and in the newspapers.

For fans of the medium. The name C.C. Beck should ring a bell. He co-created Captain Marvel, arguably the most popular comic book character of the era.

The character was popular enough to have his own comic book for a couple of issues. Surprisingly, there was no mention of Tootsie Rolls in either the stories or the ads.

Getting a burrito at Al & Bea's

Living in LA and going to Chipotle is like living in Rome and going to Pizza Hut.

Damn, Samantha was cute

Classic 1967 Commercial for 'Instant Quaker Oatmeal' with Elizabeth Montgomery

Sure it saved us twenty billion, but it sounds funny

[reposted from West Coast Stat Views -- SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012]

I was very pleased to read this report (via Mr. Salmon,) in the Washington Post:

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) believes it is time the sex life of the screwworm got its due.

 On Wednesday afternoon, Cooper rose to the defense of taxpayer-funded research into dog urine, guinea pig eardrums and, yes, the reproductive habits of the parasitic flies known as screwworms--all federally supported studies that have inspired major scientific breakthroughs. Together with two House Republicans and a coalition of major science associations, Cooper has created the first annual Golden Goose Awards to honor federally funded research “whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd, or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefiting society in significant ways.” Federally-funded research of dog urine ultimately gave scientists and understanding of the effect of hormones on the human kidney, which in turn has been helpful for diabetes patients. A study called “Acoustic Trauma in the Guinea Pig” resulted in treatment of early hearing loss in infants. And that randy screwworm study? It helped researchers control the population of a deadly parasite that targets cattle--costing the government $250,000 but ultimately saving the cattle industry more than $20 billion, according to Cooper’s office.

This is a good story in the sense that it's good news -- for too many years, important research with huge economic pay-offs has been ignored and often mocked -- but it's also a good story for a guy trying to write  a post for a science and technology blog because it illustrates so nicely some of the reasons that so much science reporting is so bad:

1. Most reporters have a weak grasp of what goes into good research. For example, studying conditions in different animals often produces giggles from the press (see the dog urine study) even though changing the population of animals studied is generally an excellent idea.

2. The press corps have an urban bias accompanied with a pronounced disinterest in agriculture. As a result, even agricultural research of immense and obvious economic value is routinely mocked by publications like the New York Times.

3. The press corps also has decided ddulite tendencies and unfortunately this research doesn't sound cool. (Even though it is.)

update: Upon review, I'm thinking that I didn't out my point sufficiently. The studies described on the WP were good, solid research that paid for itself. The media's inability to recognise good science makes it all the more difficult to fund and pursue good science.

Since it's a Bob and Ray ad we're going to call beer a food

Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding 1950's beer commercial

Earmarks and Agricultural Research

[reposted from West Coast Stat Views 9/8/11]

Sometimes the press isn't good at connecting stories, particularly when those stories don't match up with the journalists' rather constrained world-view. One of the most reliable examples is the coverage of earmarks. The very fact that earmarks are reported as budget stories is troubling, showing how easily reporters can be manipulated into wasting time on trivia, but as bad as these stories are on a general level, the specifics may be even worse.

Like so many bad trends in journalism, the archetypal example comes from Maureen Dowd, this time in a McCain puff piece from 2009. Here's the complete list of offending earmarks singled out by the senator and dutifully repeated by Dowd:

Before the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill, the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:

• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain twittered.

• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex.

• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa.

• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.

• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama.

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi.

• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas. (McCain, a devotee of Vegas and gambling, must really be against earmarks if he doesn’t want to “sustain” Vegas.)

• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.”

• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles. “Hopefully for a Back in the Saddle Again exhibit,” McCain tweeted sarcastically.

• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii. “During these tough economic times with Americans out of work,” McCain twittered.

• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia.

Putting aside the relatively minuscule amounts of money involved here, the thing that jumps out about this list is that out of 9,000 earmarks, how few real losers McCain's staff was able to come up with. I wouldn't give the Autry top priority for federal money, but they've done some good work and I assume the same holds for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Along the same lines, I have trouble getting that upset public monies spent on astronomical research. After that, McCain's selections become truly bizarre. Urban water usage is a huge issue, nowhere more important than in Western cities like Los Vegas and it's difficult to imagine anyone objecting to a program that actually gets kids out of gangs.

Of course, we have no way of knowing how effective these programs are, but questions of effectiveness are notably absent from McCain/Dowd's piece. Instead it functions solely on the level of mocking the stated purposes of the projects, which brings us to one of the most interesting and for me, damning, aspects of the list: the preponderance of agricultural research.

You could make a damned good case for agricultural research having had a bigger impact on the world and its economy over the past fifty years than research in any other field. That research continues to pay extraordinary dividends both in new production and in the control of pest and diseases. It also helps us address the substantial environmental issues that have come with industrial agriculture.

As I said before, this earmark coverage with an emphasis on agriculture is a recurring event. I remember Howard Kurtz getting all giggly over earmarks for research on dealing with waste from pig farms about ten years ago and I've lost count of the examples since then.

And interspaced between those stories at odd intervals were other reports, less flashy but far more substantial, describing some economic, environmental or public health crisis that reminded us of the need for just this kind of research. Sometimes the crisis is in one of the areas explicitly mocked (look up the impact of industrial pig farming on rural America* and see if you share Mr. Kurtz's sense of humor). Other times the specifics change, a different crop, a new pestilence, but still well within the type that writers like Dowd find so amusing.

Here's the most recent example:

Across North America, a tiny, invasive insect is threatening some eight billion trees. The emerald ash borer is deadly to ash trees. It first turned up in Detroit nine years ago, probably after arriving on a cargo ship from Asia. And since then, the ash borer has devastated forests in the upper Midwest and beyond.

* Credit where credit is due. Though not as influential as Dowd, the New York Times also runs Nicholas Kristof who has done some excellent work describing the human cost of these crises.

I like to stick with proven science like mega dosing vitamin C*

I was reading this TPM/Slice piece by Alice Hines, not all that enthralled by the writing (so far, I've found the Slice to be overwhelmingly underwhelming), but I'm interested in the subject (multilevel marketing of nutritional supplements) and I was generally in agreement with the skeptical tone. Then I hit this:

I try a peppermint oil myself on my last day in Utah, when I’m having allergies. Jeanne had mentioned it was great for sinus problems, so I place a few drops under my nose and wait optimistically. The spicy candy cane smell helps clear my sinuses exactly as much as the EMPowerplus Q96 helped me overcome my irrational fear of wrecking my rental car: not at all. On my way to the airport, still sniffling, I stop by a coffee shop and order a lavender Kombucha. Bubbly, sour, fragrant, tonic...the liquid does everything the oil didn’t. As I sip it and think about how in a few hours I’ll be home, rental car safely returned, the mucus in my throat washes away. Maybe it was the Zyrtec I took that morning, or maybe it was something more transcendent. To quote Denise, it just worked.

I am entirely ready to believe that a hot beverage can help clear the throat but attributing the medicinal properties to Kombucha, even the lavender variety, makes me a bit nervous:

According to the American Cancer Society, "Kombucha tea has been promoted as a cure-all for a wide range of conditions including baldness, insomnia, intestinal disorders, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, and cancer. Supporters say that Kombucha tea can boost the immune system and reverse the aging process."[1] Drinking Kombucha can cause liver damage and death.[2] Although laboratory experiments are suggestive of possible health effects, there is no evidence that kombucha consumption benefits human health.[19][20][21]

Case reports "raise doubts about the safety of kombucha",[21] since there have been incidents of central nervous system impairment, suspected liver damage, metabolic acidosis,[21] and toxicity in general.[21][22] Acute conditions caused by drinking of kombucha, such as lactic acidosis, are more likely to occur in persons with pre-existing medical conditions.[22] Other reports suggest exercising caution if regularly drinking kombucha while taking medical drugs or hormone replacement therapy.[23] Kombucha may also cause allergic reactions.[24] Some adverse health effects may be due to the acidity of the tea, cautioning preparers to avoid over-fermentation.[25]

Maybe she was better of with the peppermint oil.

* KIDDING!

Wow, the mask really comes off on this one

Watch a few minutes -- at least a few minutes -- of this video, enough to get the general idea. Then check below the fold to find out what happened to that little nutritional supplement company called Nutrilite.

Could Nathan Myhrvold's aeration tips be full of hot air?

I've talked about Nathan Myhrvold on the other blog, usually regarding his company Intellectual Ventures or his odd position on solar cells, but for most of the non-geek world, Myhrvold is best known for writing about food and since this is a food blog.

JOHN LANCHESTER writing for the New Yorker.

He hired two chefs who had worked in the kitchen of the Fat Duck, the science-minded experimental restaurant in Bray, England, and got busy. The result is an astounding magnum opus, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” (The Cooking Lab; $625), which was written by Myhrvold and his chefs Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, and “required the combined efforts of several dozen people over the span of three years.” This isn’t how most cookbooks are produced, but, as the authors point out, “that level of effort is the norm for a major reference work or college textbook.” The book consists of five thick, thirteen-by-eleven-inch volumes and a ring-bound volume of recipes, and comes in at twenty-four hundred and thirty-eight pages. In its packed state, it weighs forty-six pounds. The scale and ambition of the project—and maybe at least one of the egos behind it—are Pharaonic.

One of the innovations Myhrvold came up with was “hyperdecanting,” aerating wine by running it through a blender. It sounds reasonable, particularly when explained with the boundless self-confidence Myhrvold brings to all of his interviews. 

Of course, Myhrvold brings that same self-assurance to subjects like global warming and intellectual property. His assertions in those areas haven't held up to scrutiny, so you have to wonder what an independent test might reveal.

Which brings us to...

It was time to do our own Wine-Searcher test. Myhrvold's instructions for his experiment are pretty simple. Pour the wine into the blender and zap it on the highest setting for 30 to 60 seconds. Then let the froth subside before serving.

We selected two young reds – the sort of wine that he'd suggested would benefit most from "hyper-decanting": a $17 Australian merlot and an $18 South African pinotage.

One third of each bottle would go into the blender and be whizzed for 45 seconds – the midpoint of Myhrvold's 30 to 60 seconds. Another third would be decanted in the normal way and left to sit for an hour, while the remainder would be poured direct from the bottle.

Interestingly, the wine samples that had been through the blender were the least liked by the Wine-Searcher tasting panel. Instead, the wines poured straight from the bottle were considered to have retained the most fruit and a linear structure.

Obviously, it would be nice to know a bit more about how this experiment was conducted – it’s not even clear whether it was a blind test – but at the very least, the outcome does suggest that maybe we should be taking this and other claims from Modernist Cuisine with, if you'll pardon the metaphor, a grain of salt.

Really not that damned funny

[reposted from West Coast Stat Views June 2010]

Whenever earmark season comes along opportunistic politicians and their hand-puppet journalists have a grand old time making jokes about the silly things these trivial amounts of money go to. The ones that get the biggest laughs are agricultural earmarks. Here are some comedy stylings of McCain and Dowd. Over half of the earmarks they have fun with involve agriculture and land management.

Today's New York Times has a reminder of what the cost of blights and pests can be:

Lynet Nalugo dug a cassava tuber out of her field and sliced it open.
Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast.
“Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.
The plant was what she called a “2961,” meaning it was Variant No. 2961, the only local strain bred to resist cassava mosaic virus, a disease that caused a major African famine in the 1920s.
But this was not mosaic disease, which only stunts the plants. Her field had been attacked by a new and more damaging virus named brown streak, for the marks it leaves on stems.
That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.
Although it has been seen on coastal farms for 70 years, a mutant version emerged in Africa’s interior in 2004, “and there has been explosive, pandemic-style spread since then,” said Claude M. Fauquet, director of cassava research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “The speed is just unprecedented, and the farmers are really desperate.”
Two years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened cassava experts and realized that brown streak “was alarming quite a few people,” said Lawrence Kent, an agriculture program officer at the foundation. It has given $27 million in grants to aid agencies and plant scientists fighting the disease.
The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories. Under many names, including manioc, tapioca and yuca, it is eaten by 800 million people in Africa, South America and Asia.

Maybe it's just me but I really don't see what's so funny about agricultural research. Perhaps Maureen can explain it to me.

Reflections on a cheap bag of rice

This bag of rice got me thinking...

As you probably know, a major impetus for this blog was the realization that most of the people who write about what we used to call home economics have little idea what things cost and no idea how to live on a budget. One of the threads I started in response to that was an informal survey of what budget staples cost at various grocery stores.

If you have to feed yourself on a very little money, you will very probably end up eating a lot of beans and either rice or potatoes. Rice is easier to transport and (at least for white rice) store. Potatoes are easier to cook and are, perhaps, a bit more versatile. As for price, that depends on sales.

This is the best price I’ve seen on rice since I started this experiment (seen in Chinatown at a neighborhood Wal-Mart grocery). According to the nutritional panel on the package, this comes to less than a nickel a serving. Now, it should be noted that a “serving” in this context isn’t that much food, particularly if you’re trying to build a meal around it, but two or three will go a long ways toward filling you up, particularly when combined with a good helping of beans and a piece of chicken. At the store in question, red beans were $1.50 lb. and value-packs of chicken were $0.99 lb, so you can have a filling, if simple meal for under a dollar.

Of course, these are reduced prices and trying to live on sales brings with it a whole new set of complications. To do this effectively requires significant planning, time, self-discipline and flexibility. Plan on hitting two or three stores a week and spending a lot of time in each. The marketing psychology behind sales is designed to get you to buy things that you don’t need, so you’ll have to be vigilant; just throwing away a bad purchase is not an option when you’re living on less than $30 a week.

Then there is the question of storage. This is where we hit one of the many paradoxes of shopping while poor. By far the cheapest way to go is to go for volume either with large economy sizes or by stocking up when you find a good sale, but poverty frequently comes with cash flow problems, limited storage and pests.

I warned you about this

From 6 Dark Secrets Harbored By Your Favorite Foods By Jim Avery

#5. Almond Milk Is More Like Almond Water (And Is Ruining The Environment)

bhofack2/iStock/Getty Images

Recently, the world has discovered that almonds are more than something you can insert into a candy bar to make people complain about them. Hailed as a "superfood," they're starting to show up in all sorts of recipes, and they're now a popular milk substitute. Most of us have seen that bizarre talking almond monstrosity in the Silk commercials, while the UK gets to drink Alpro, which is probably represented by a talking beaver or some shit.

Alpro
OK, you win, England. This one's more disturbing.

But how do they make almond milk, anyway? If almonds had boobs, we probably would have noticed by now. Put simply, they take water and add a bunch of ground-up almonds to it. And by that, we mean that around two percent of Alpro "almond" milk is actually almonds. A handful of almonds is 160 calories, while a cup of almond milk is only 30 calories; to get the same health benefits as that handful of almonds, you need to chug an entire carton of almond milk like you're joining the world's wussiest fraternity. Almond milk has more potassium and vitamins, but those things are directly injected during the production process; it's like they tossed a single multivitamin into the mix.

Not only that, but this obsession with almonds is ruining the environment. California is the source of maybe 80 percent of the world's almonds, and almonds require water, by virtue of being things that grow. Meanwhile, California is also suffering from nearly unprecedented droughts, while almond farmers siphon off water from underground reserves to keep growing their crops. We'd make a pun with the word "nuts" right now, but Cracked HQ is in Santa Monica, so we're too dehydrated to think of anything.

motherjones.com
That water spike before 2003 was the torrent of tears from Firefly getting cancelled.

So our most populated state is going thirsty so we can provide the world with its favorite candy-ruiner and pretend we're too good for regular milk. Nice, everyone.

Volto from Mars

Briefly, in 1945 and 1946, Volto was all over the funnies, both in comic books and the Sunday paper, drawn by two very well established Golden Age artists (Al Plastino and Frank Robbins), then he disappeared without a trace...

until God invented the internet.

"The Bronx Paradox"

Interesting article from the New York Times a few years ago:

WHEN most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk.
Once, maybe.
But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.
Call it the Bronx Paradox.
“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.”
The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan, according to Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
But the Bronx also faces stubborn hunger problems. According to a survey released in January by the Food Research and Action Center, an antihunger group, nearly 37 percent of residents in the 16th Congressional District, which encompasses the South Bronx, said they lacked money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months. That is more than any other Congressional district in the country and twice the national average, 18.5 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports). This might mean simply being unable to afford the basics, unable to get to the grocery or unable to find fresh produce among the pizza shops, doughnut stores and fried-everything restaurants of East Fordham Road.

The last one really brings home the Green Revolution.

Max Roser has a visual history of world hunger and food provision at Our World In Data. Definitely

A hypothetical Trader Joe's SNAP challenge – – laying the foundation

A few weeks ago, I criticized a reporter for trying to take the SNAP challenge (living for a week on a food stamp budget) with groceries she bought from Trader Joe's (which I described as a "rich person's idea of a poor person's grocery"). In addition to picking an expensive store, the writer made a long string of bad choices, buying prepared foods and individual servings while passing over cheap, high-protein options. In response to this, I decided to try to construct a good $28 shopping list at the same store.

Here's what I came up with. I want to emphasize from the beginning just how limited the cheap food choices are at Trader Joe's. The following list comes very close to exhausting the options.

Doing a SNAP challenge at TJ’s means rethinking the most basic assumptions about shopping on a tight budget. Most of the staples we would normally use as our foundation – oatmeal, cabbage, rice and, most importantly, dried beans – are either unavailable or have been ‘gentrified,’ reimagined in far more expensive, gourmet form. We can still use some of these staples, but not in the same quantities. We won’t be able to fall back on another plate of rice and beans to stretch the budget.

I normally wouldn’t begin this shopping list in the meat and poultry section, but given our limited options and the importance of maintaining protein levels, I’m going to start with 

Drumsticks 3 lb

    $4.50

    approx. 260 g protein

    9 to 12 servings

Whenever possible, I want to pick versatile foods and chicken scores very high in that respect, both as a stand-alone dish and as an ingredient in a soup, casserole or hash. Even someone with my limited culinary skills can make any number of appealing, inexpensive dishes. 

Whole milk 1/2 gallon

$1.99

approx. 60 g protein

8 servings

I normally drink skim but I suspect the whole milk will be more filling


I'm going to stop including protein numbers from here on partly because the picture gets a little murky -- there are going to be some choices left open that would affect the totals (type of beans, for example) -- but mainly because we’re in fairly safe territory. Our complete shopping list will certainly meet the 50 g RDA and will probably break 400 g for the week. We should be in good shape.

Beans (four cans)
$3.60

I’m thinking 3 cans of black beans for soup and one garbanzo for side dishes and possibly as topping for pasta or salad.

Tomatoes (one can 28oz)
$1.60

Yellow onion
$0.80

Carrots (1.5 lb bag)
$1.50

Spinach (1 lb bag frozen)
$1.50

Sea salt
$1.00


Starch

Normally this choice would come down to either rice or potatoes. Both are versatile. Rice is easier to transport and store. Potatoes are easier to cook. The choice comes down to personal taste and what's on sale.

Unfortunately both rice and potatoes are pricey at Trader Joe's. Pasta, on the other hand, is surprisingly competitive and therefore goes back into the rotation.

$2.70
(3 lb potatoes and 1 bag of pasta)

or

 $3.30
(3 lb jasmine rice)

I'm going to go with the potatoes and pasta because I think they go well with the other foods and what I have planned for them.

Let's add three bananas and stop there... just under $20. We've got a pretty good shopping cart's worth of high-value groceries. You could live on this food for a week but it does leave a lot to be desired. That's why I left eight dollars to play with. Having covered the nutritional basics, you can start thinking about trade-offs.

Certain things aren't available in cheap form at Trader Joe's: sugar, coffee, oatmeal, cooking oil, just to name a few. Obviously, you can't have everything you want for eight dollars, so you have to prioritize. How important is fresh-ground coffee compared to instant? Would you rather have three apples or that bottle of hot sauce? Maybe that box of cookies is worth $3.50 or perhaps you'd just like to double down on some of the staples and make sure you'll have plenty of food.

How people actually shop -- the grocery store around the corner

At least in Echo Park, which is one of the LA neighborhoods I spend a lot of time in, partly for social reasons and partly because I volunteer with a local non-profit.

I was killing time before tutoring the other day when I ducked into a market off Sunset for a soda. On my way out I grabbed one of their weekly ads which you can see below in cropped form.

Of course, a sales circular is not an unbiased random sample by any stretch of the imagination, but this does give you an idea what shopping is like in neighborhoods you probably just drive past.

Shades of Captain America --"The Nazis are supposed to have a superman vitamin pill"

That's an actual quote from this 1943 film from the Office of War and I'm certain it represented a real sentiment of the time. As mentioned before, vitamins had a great mystique around this time. The very word 'vitamin' was relatively new.




Nazi science also had great mystique. Fortunately for us, it turned out that German engineers were better at dreaming up superweapons than they were at actually making them work.

As for vitamins, their nutritional reputation has held up, though the kind that gave up superpowers remained the stuff of comic books.




Food for Fighters
by U.S. Office of War Information

Published ca. 1943
Usage Public Domain
Topics World War II: Homefront, Nutrition, Agriculture: Food industry


Importance of nutrition in wartime.


Run time 9:50
Producer U.S. Office of War Information
Sponsor N/A
Audio/Visual Sd, B&W

Energy Packed Sunbeam Bread

As you may have noticed, I've been going through a lot of old food and beverage ads recently digging up material for the blog and I've started to notice certain patterns. One is that, from the Thirties to the Fifties, manufacturers frequently promoted the "energy" in their products. This was especially true with candy companies like Curtiss,

but these ads for Sunbeam Bread show that it wasn't limited to sweets.

It would be interesting to know a bit more of the history here, but I have no idea where to look.

Repost -- "Is not" journalism and our excessive tolerance of silliness

SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2012

On Marketplace yesterday, Pierre Desrochers, author of the Locavore's Dilemma, presented his case against locavores. It did not go well.

There are good arguments against the locavore movement, that it's a distraction, that it isn't scalable, that it's a solution only available to the well-off, that the superiority of local produce is largely due to suggestion, that there's no good business model to support it, that frozen vegetables are actually more nutritious. I don't necessarily agree with all of these, but they're serious arguments that an advocate of the locavore movement have to address.

Desrochers doesn't make any of these arguments, nor will you see him addressing issues like asymmetry of information or monocultures. Instead we get what we so often get from contrarians, shrill and unadulterated silliness. The bar for these "is not" pieces is so embarrassingly low as to barely exclude grunts and spit bubbles. In this case, Desrochers' "arguments"* depend on the following assumptions:

1. Almost everyone will become a locavore;

2. Rather than trying to eat more locally grown food, locavores will eat nothing but local;

3. Even in times of shortage and crop failure, there will be no imports;

4. and despite all of this locavores will continue eating the exact same food in the same seasons.

On top of this, Desrochers doesn't even seem to have kept up with the debate. Consider this:

It's better to grow tomatoes in the Florida sun than in a heated greenhouse in upstate New York because the energy required to transport them 1200 miles is only a fraction of that required to heat greenhouses for several weeks. 

Florida tomatoes are literally the worst possible crop  to use as an example here.

In addition to being tasteless, Estabrook also points out that compared to tomatoes from other sources or from a few decades ago, the modern Florida variety have fewer nutrients, more pesticides (particularly compared to those from California), and are picked with what has been described as 'slave labor' (and given the use of shackles this doesn't seem like much of an exaggeration). 

Estabrook's book got a tremendous amount of press and it's hard to imagine that anyone who encountered any of that coverage would use Florida tomatoes as an anti-locavore example.
By the same token it's hard to imagine that anyone who had been following the discussion of the trend toward fewer varieties of crops with more geographic concentration would use blights and pests to support the status quo as Desrochers does.

I don't want to spend too much time on the locavore debate (if that's what you're looking for, Felix Salmon's a good place to start ). What interests me here is the journalistic phenomena of is-not-ism, We start with a trendy, over-hyped movement. For bonus points, its promoters tend to be self-satisfied, upper class liberals, they kind who annoy even other liberals.

At this point, if you can get someone with reasonable credentials to write an "is not" book taking the opposite position, that's really all that's required. The actual content doesn't matter. Commentators of similar persuasion will promote the book (even those who are smart enough to see through it).. Mainstream media outlets will give the authors airtime in the name of openness and balance.

>But openness to new ideas is only a virtue if it's accompanied by some sort of critical facility. We need to start recognizing silliness again and, more to the point, we need to start demanding more.

Jay Ward presents Quisp

Quisp

Quisp and the similarly marketed cereal Quake were originally released in 1965 in the United States by the Quaker Oats Company and generally advertised together (during the same commercial) with their character mascots competing against each other. The ads were cartoons created by Jay Ward, who also created the cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, and many others, and the Quisp ads used some of the same voice actors as the Rocky and Bullwinkle series, including Daws Butler as the voice of Quisp (an alien) and William Conrad as the voice of Quake (a miner). In an interview, Ward's creative partner Bill Scott described Ward's involvement in cereal advertising: "When the cereal company approached Jay about doing this stuff — I think it was in 1961 — he said, 'We’ll only do it as long as it’s fun.'"