Gaines Burgers

..Continuing with my series on food-like products.  Remember Gaines burgers?

I just loved the Gaines burgers commercial when I was a kid.  The burger-shaped product, and like most food-like products, suitable only for dogs, came in an individually-wrapped package, just like today's cheese-products in our kids lunchbox.

Even though I was young, I thought it would be really fun to open one up and crumble it up, just like playing with jello or tapioca pudding.  It was always opened up by a housewife with an immaculate manicure that surely she kept that way by not opening up all those stinkin' cans of regular dog food.

When the crumbled burger went into the bowl, the dog, starved for days, wolfed it down.  

I wanted to buy these, crumble them, and feed the dog.  Unfortunately, we didn't have a dog.  Maybe we could get one.  The neighbors had dogs, but nobody had enough money for these burgers.  They were in another class, along with those packets of laundry detergent you just toss in, central air conditioning, and sugar-sweetened cereal all-you-can-eat every every morning.

What I never got is how they stayed so fresh in the cupboard and why they went to the trouble of creating a burger and then always served it crumbled.  When I got older, I realized that unlike Denise Minger, these burgers were not made of meat.  I also found out that dogs would eat anything.  I also found out that there is no end to the creativity of the food technologists, giving us novel, dopamine-increasing fun stuff like pop rocks, chicken nuggets, Happy Meals and Cracker Jacks prizes.  Unfortunately, I also learned that when you start by making mud pies and then graduate to modeling clay, baking bread and making your own pasta isn't far behind.

Now exactly, where does Health Start?

After my letter to Whole Foods the other day (and oh, they never wrote back....) I got ahold of an interesting flyer from Whole Foods.  It's called the whole deal.  Just so you know, this whole deal thing is trademarked, just like their vegan propaganda health program they call Health Starts Here.

Then again, it is pretty difficult to tell exactly where health starts from the flyer.  There is a chicken on the front cover, and hints of more animal things to come, with a container of chicken broth right next to the chicken and a stream of text at the bottom announcing that chicken is on sale too.

I open the flyer, and on the inside cover is a plate o' shrimp.  And so I am thinking, OK, plate o' shrimp, guess they are in on the joke, but then there were lots of animaly things in the flyer, including goat cheese in nearly about every recipe, except of course the recipes with the health starts here logo near them, cause they are vegan.

It didn't seem like health really started until about page 12, where the grainy foods and the tea were featured and the foods featuring flesh or animal secretions fell away.  This was several pages after the coupon for the artercloggingsaturatedfat coconut oil that they call "health supportive".

So what is up with that?  Does health really start here, after all the ads supposedly sponsored by all those evil meat, milk companies, and other profitable conglomerates Dr. MacDougall has declared war against?  Does health start with plain vegan and then settles into just plain coconut oil right out of the jar after a few months?

Maybe Whole Foods isn't as hostile a place as it was over a year ago, the last time I visited.  Maybe I'll give them another chance if I need some tea.

This Just In - For your Emmy Consideration

Interrupting my regularly scheduled episode where I put myself and a certain statistical study together in the ring and see what kind of entertainment we can deliver. 

Y'all know all about the knitting group, but what you might not know is that there is this table of free stuff right outside the classroom, and I take advantage of it freely.  It has all sorts of stuff, not just stacks of Diabetes Educator magazines and other offerings from the "Academy", but great fluffy stuff I can take with me into the cold tub and not worry if I dunk it a couple of times.

Yesterday was a score:  an actual timely copy of Oprah, Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple magazines, all admonishing me to take advantage of seasonal produce, lower my fat and declutter my life.  'Course, that isn't working when I just clutter up my life again with free magazines.  Interspersed with articles telling me to get rid of the junk are ads for closet organizing "systems", featuring women who are much younger and thinner than I, and seem to have a whole lot more clothes, including an entire row of beige jackets.  And I am thinking that despite the air-brushing and great make-up, do they work for some insurance company or airport car rental kiosk to have all that beige?  I am happy to report that my closet indicates that I have never worked for said companies.

One great find was a recent issue of Southern Living, all about barbeque.  This I could get into, even though the back of the issue was littered with 30 kinds of "icebox" cream pie.

Anyway, I am off track again, just can't resist another helping of irony, I guess.  The REAL reason for this post is that it looks like a member of the Academy took Martha's advice and started decluttering.  The REAL Academy, not the fake dietary Academy.  Well, not actually the Academy, but close enough.  People not from around here probably don't know this, but around awards time, members of the Academy or other trade associations get mountains of mail, chocked full of CD's of movies, TV shows and other promotional material.  I know all about this because the guy who lived in my house before me was a member of the REAL Academy and didn't get around to changing his address, and I got a whole lot of free movies that year, all with warnings not to share with others.  This year, some industry member just decided to unload his junk mail on to the free table.

I picked up the copy of "The Weight of the Nation" mostly because I am a packaging junkie and I love to see how these promo items are put together.  I wasn't disappointed.  Right under the picture of the United States cracking into a million pieces under all that weight was written in a tasteful font, of course, "FOR YOUR EMMY CONSIDERATION".  I already watched part of the series until I got bored.  Anyone else think it was kind of like those biblical prophecy videos, which pictures of the world cracking or being blown up into a million pieces along with ominous music and snippets of some spiritual light-related thing like a stained-glass window or stonehenge?  BTDT, sooooo derivative.  This series that an industry insider was supposed to consider was contained in three CD's in a nice sturdy holder I might use for my other CD's.  I might recycle the CD's also. (I certainly won't actually WATCH them again, who wants to sit through a half hour of material crammed into a 4-part series?)  I really need a larger spindle to spin some bulky yarn Navajo-style.  The extra weight of all 3 CD's will give me the extra weight I need for this project.  So for THAT, I would like to thank the Academy.

Paleo on 1000 dollars a day

I guess I was just getting sick of the commerciality of paleo, with everyone seeming to hawk their gym, their website, their book, their individualized plan, etc. etc. etc.

I do believe it is fine for people to make a living, but what concerns me about this practice is that once someone comes out with a book, all they do is defend it.  They become so invested in doing it the way of their book, that they can't seem to look beyond anything anymore.

It is even more dicey for these folks to change their course.  If they don't change, they are just rigid, but if they do, some whiner complains that they are wishy-washy.  They really can't win until the nastiness subsides and people can really take a good view of things and have a civil discussion.

I haven't purchased a paleo book, or a DVD, an exclusive seminar or phone call, a closed chat room, or any touted supplements from India.  Maybe someday I'll buy a locker of grass-fed beef.  I probably don't need to say that I am not buying anything from Harvard either.