Gas Prices – Food Prices – Green BS – Oh My!

The Whole Foods in San Francisco, no more expensive than Loblaw’s although I  have read it’s the most expensive Whole Foods in the US. Nice stuff too. And THEY DON”T CHARGE FOR BAGS. They have these wonderful double paper bags!!! I brought one home for a keepsake.

A few years ago, when i was heading out to visit a potential client on the South Shore, or was it to give a talk on media literacy at a school, anyway, I got lost (no GPS) and then ran out of gas and I went to a self-serve, but the nozzle wouldn’t fit into the hole of the gas tank and I was confused and a guy came around and pointed to the pump. DIESEL. Lucky for me they have this failsafe, or I would have destroyed the engine on the car (apparently) all for a small copywriting commission.

Yesterday, I was driving to  the Reno Depot at Vaudreuil with the husband (to pick up some plastic contact paper for redecorating) and I noticed the price of Diesel at the corner truck stop was MORE than regular.

“Wasn’t diesel always so much less than regular? I asked.”Isn’t that why you considered buying a Rabbit a few years back, so save on gas for the commute.”

“Yes,” my husband replied and then gave me a lecture of difference between home oil and diesel (none but the colour) and how he once heard  story about a woman who drove a Mercedes Diesel who filled it with home oil.

“Well,”I replied, (having a Eureka Moment.”NO WONDER THE PRICE OF FOOD IS SO HIGH.”

In the morning,we had gone to Loblaw’s to buy a ‘picnic’ luncheon to bring to my father in law at the Veteran’s Hospital in Ste. Anne de Bellevue.

We never shop at Loblaw’s anymore. But we were only buying a few things, right, bbq chicken and a selection of salads. (Cheaper and healthier than the St. Hubert Family Pack we usually take.

Well, the chicken for 9.99 was scrawny (although it claimed to be 1 kilo…well, IT didn’t claim, dead chickens don’t talk)..and the selection of salads at the deli, although interesting, looked as if they’d been made the day before.The tops were discoloured. I bought a few salads but then decided on the pre-packaged cole slaw and potato salad for my father in law. He’s 92.He doesn’t need to get salmonella poisoning.

There was a couple beside me, younger, and when the tally was completed for their order, the woman exclaimed “337dollars! What did we buy for that?” “No meat,” her husband answered.

So it goes. 25 years ago, when my husband first started working in the city, the cost of gas was 1/4 what it is today.He wasn’t making that much, but frankly, he’s much worse off today. His salary topped off a decade ago and he gets no overtime.And the inflation!

Lucky our kids are grown. But they are finding it tough with the cost of living as it is. My son is a chef, who knows how to cook anything, but he says he lives on Pork, a meat I myself don’t touch. But I may have to. Or go vegetarian like my other son.

Anyway, when we left, we refused to ‘buy’ a plastic bag and put our items one by one in the cart. I gave my usual rant, under my breath. “Why have us pay for bags when there’s nothing but plastic packaging on every product and THAT’S what ends up in the oceans.”

On CBS’s Sunday Morning they had a bit about the immense islands or plastic floating in all the oceans, getting into the fish. And these have been noticed only since the 1990′s.

This didn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed that the amount of plastic on everything (used to secure any kind of bottle, so you have to cut it open surgically) has grown exponentially in the past two decades. They even wrap EACH INDIVIDUAL Band AID up so well, you ruin 5 before you get one open. (Considering you are often opening up a band aid with a cut on a finger.)

And the grocery companies have duped us into paying extra for these plastic bags (a idea generated by some San Francisco school children years ago, which caught on because it MAKES money for the grocery stores and it allows consumers to think they are doing their part,it appeases their guilt. But we are ALL responsible for those ugly indestructible  islands of  man-made polymers and what else in the oceans.)

They charge 5 cents a plastic bag, while they rake in profits from over-packaging their over processed unhealthy products. NONSENSE.

Why don’t they just use paper, like Whole Foods?

Canadian Food Purity 1910

I’ve written a lot about the PURE FOOD Movement in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, and how virtually every new food or household product claimed, in its advertisements, to be pure, Ivory Soap being just one of these many products.
And I’ve written about a Dr. Wiley and his fight in the US against the patent medicine people, many of whom ran off to Canada to keep in business.

An article from Macleans in 1912 about Food Standards quotes Wiley as saying `he will continue to work until the whole family of preservatives and colorants are in the boneyard.`

So Dr. Wiley was well known even in Canada even if his laws did not much matter in this country, except with respect to exports.

This Maclean’s article claims we have our own Dr. Wiley, a Dr. A. McGill of the Food Standards branch of Inland Revenue.

Like Dr. Wiley, McGill is concerned with patent medicines, their more dangerous ingredients as well as their outlandish claims. And like Dr. Wiley, McGill is concerned about soft drinks, but not so much the additives, but the fact some are spiked with alcohol. But he’s not a temperance type: he is also concerned that alcoholic beverages are often watered down. And he is concerned with milk, not so much with respect to contamination, which is a huge problem in Montreal. He is concerned with quality control. Milk in Canada, he says, must contain at least 3 and a quarter percent milk fat (it was rich back then).

This 1912 article mentions some canned goods that are diluted, not dangerous, just a waste of money, and suggests if housewives were as diligent as they once had been, few of them would be cheated out. Apparently, canned goods didn`t exist until the 1890′s.

Dr. Wiley in the US, who got the 1908 Pure Food Act pushed through was a crusader. Our Dr. McGill appears to be the diligent civil servant.

Wiley ended up on the wrong side of history with respect to the preservative business: preservatives and colourants became huge business in the middle of the century as we all well know. Only lately have preservatives in food re-emerged as a potential health issue. So we now have “natural foods” and “organic foods” etc.

If Dr. Wiley of the US was aiming to stop the new preservative industry in its tracks, Canada’s Dr. McGill was more circumspect. Salt, sugar, vinegar, he said, were old-fashioned time-tested preservatives that were also dangerous if over indulged in, so why condemn the new chemical preservatives. (This is a rather prescient remark, considering the huge amounts of sugar and salt in fast foods and convenience foods and the impact they are having on our health.)

Ivory Soap, like some other iconic 20th century brands, also succeeded in the 20th century due to advertising that was more visual than verbal, life-style oriented, aimed at making housewives feel better about their lives and their homes. This style was created at J. Walter Thompson.

I think Macleans has an article about the new and influential profession of advertising. I’ll write about that next.