A quick note about portions...

On my last few trips to the local Cost U Less I've been noticing that a lot of products have been changing their packaging and playing with the volume/weight...

This does not make me a happy camper!

In my world, a half-gallon bottle should actually contain a half-gallon, a five-pound bag of rice should contain five pounds and so on... The old standard one-pound package of spaghetti now seem to be 14-ounces or less.

Fiddling the amounts to increase profit is an old trick used by companies but, for those of us who do long term/range provisioning, it requires some higher math to figure out if you can get from point A to B without running out of something needful.

I don't know about you, but my higher math skills really suck when I'm forced to listen to piped in muzak while being jostled by folks who can't seem to control their shopping carts. So to be safe I tend to overbuy or not buy some stuff at all.

Kinda problematic!

Real news and less BS please... Food and candy edition

Two news stories that really caught my attention this week is the outlawing of my favorite holiday in Bobtown PA and the report about the ten most dangerous foods in America. Both instill fear and for most people seem quite reasonable and crank up that bunker mentality yet another notch. Too bad that both stories are really more the stuff of urban legends and simply bad statistics.

Everyone has heard the urban legends of kids on Halloween eating apples with razor blades, chocolates laced with strychnine  or LSD... Fact is it has NEVER happened anywhere in the USA... EVER! So the Bobtown politicos outlawing Halloween to keep the kids safe is hardly a needful law but it most certainly deprives kids of something special. No doubt we will be seeing more of this stupidity in the near future....

As far as the ten most dangerous foods story... It was all the rage this week. All of a sudden I could not read the news without being assaulted by stories telling me that potatoes were unsafe, Tuna was a near death experience and eating ice cream was suicidal but the fact of the matter is NOT SO! Take a moment and read Casual Kitchen for the real story. Just as an aside, it's interesting this came out while the meat industry is getting nailed yet again with bad press over the sad story of  Stephanie Smith and its spin-offs... Just a coincidence?

We seem to be living in an age of fear  and the powers that be like it just fine. If we are all in terror of everything we are easy to control.

Eat spinach...

Take your kids trick or treating...

Rant over!