Thoughts on Ketchup

I remember when ketchup came in glass jars and it was so thick you had to slap the jar hard. An uncontrolled burst of ketchup would land on your plate. If you didn't shake the jar, a watery substance would leak out.

These days ketchup comes in squeezable plastic bottles. It's no longer thick, but runny. You don't have to shake it anymore.

They've fixed a lot of these ketchup problems, yet somehow there's less satisfaction in eating ketchup. It's too easy.

Spreadable lettuce.

I have a great idea for a new invention.*

Spreadable lettuce. You know how when you leave lettuce in your fridge for a long time, it gets slimy?

Well why not manufacture this process and market it as spreadable lettuce?

It can come in a jar and you just spread it on like butter. It would be sort of a thick, dark green colour, and obviously would have a rich lettuce taste.

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* Actually I stole this from my wife and added a few more details.

Mini-mini wheats.

Mini wheats is a cereal that has taken a block of wheat, and made them small and bite-sized. Thus the name mini.

Now they have even smaller mini wheats, mini-mini wheats. I bought a box from the grocery store yesterday.

The box says these mini wheats are "nearly HALF THE SIZE". I interpret that as smaller, but not quite 50% smaller. Perhaps they're only 40% smaller.

But then again, when you think about it, the sentence could mean that they're not quite half the size they're smaller still - they're almost half the size. Perhaps they're 55% smaller and the manufacturer couldn't quite get them to be 50% so they added "nearly" to the box.

Yet those interpretations are opposite. How can "nearly or almost half the size" mean bigger than half the size and smaller than half the size?

I'm going to go with my first interpretation.

Why we're all fat.

We consume more calories than we burn. The extra calories are added to our body as fat stores. That's the simplest, easiest and most accurate description about why we're fat.

I just came back from the grocery store and noted that a hummus and flatbread snack pack, 110 calories, cost $2.19

A large bag of sun chips, 980 calories, cost $2.99.

Per calorie, junk food is shockingly cheap. Another reason why we're all fat.

Many activities are sedentary. Think surfing the internet, working in an office, watching a movie, watching television.

Our government cut school sports funding by 100% this year. A week a ago they came out with a report saying elementary-aged kids are fatter than ever.

More reasons why we're fat.

Always read the label.

Here is the label on one side of a box of cookies we bought for Jake:

Advancing Nutrition is Beech-Nut's pledge to provide nutritious food choices for your toddler. Let's Grow! products are made from natural and essential nutrients of the highest standards.

Here is what the other side says:

% Daily Value

Vitamin A 0%

Vitamin C 0%

Calcium 0%

Iron 0%

Food items should be named by their first two ingrediants.

One of my best ideas when it comes to food labelling is to abolish food brand names. No more cheerios or Coke or Mars bars. Get rid of the brand name.

Instead, we refer to the food item by its first two (sometimes three ingredients).

For example, Coke would be re-named, "Carbonated water sugar drink". Corn Pops cereal would be called "Corn meal and sugar cereal". Aunt Jemima's maple syrup would be called "Glucose sugar and water syrup".

In fact, pretty much every packaged food would be called something sugar. Sugar is almost always in the top three food ingredients.

Real foods - like all natural peanut butter would actually be called "Peanut butter". Milk would be called milk and eggs would be called eggs.

The benefits of my idea is that it will give us more awareness of what foods we are actually consuming. When we see that our frozen blueberry waffles are actually called "wheat and corn meal waffles", we'll be less likely to consume them.

A discussion about the 500 mile diet.

Last summer my sister was telling me about the 100 mile diet. You only eat things grown within 100 miles of your house. She said it’s good for the environment and benefits the local community and economy.

I asked her why I should spend more on food and suffer the inconvenience of not having oranges or certain fruits, so that local farmers could make more money? In other words, what’s in it for me?

We had a back and forth for awhile and then I was all motivated to post the ideas we discussed to this blog. Then I just didn't bother. I didn't feel like it.

Now one of my coworkers is telling me the same thing and I'm annoyed. She started aggressively telling me about this 100 mile diet, while I ignored her.

When she stopped talking I said. "You and I have a different mindset. I totally disagree with you."

Then she said, "Let's hear what you have to say!"

I said, "No, I'm not going to get into with you at work."

Then she went on for a few minutes about how she hates buying chicken at the supermarket and only buys organic eggs laid by free range hens.

I said, "I don't want to pay more money for inferior local food. No thanks."

She said, "It will only cost more until the infrastructure is built!"

I said a couple more things about liking eating oranges and melons in the winter. Then I turned away from her and stared at my computer. I could hear her still talking about it, all riled up.

At one point I glanced up and she was waving a banana at me.

Lesson: Don't argue with socialist co-workers about fad ideas. They'll wave a banana at you.

Some food items that have improved remarkably.

Remember how gross frozen pizza used to be? I remember cooking it in university. It was a round, rubbery disk of fake cheese and stale tomato sauce. It tasted nothing like a pizza.

Instant popcorn used to be pretty gross. I'm thinking of that popcorn you held over the stove element. It would burn and half the kernels wouldn't pop. Then microwave popcorn came along and it's just awesome.

Airplane food used to be nasty. Then the airplanes started hiring chefs to prepare menus and the food became good. Impressive, actually.

TV dinners used to be gross. Now there are a whole bunch of Lean Cuisine frozen meals - from lasagna to stir fry. Very tasty.

When I was a kid, Doritos chips used to be pretty gross. Then they came out with Cool Ranch and a whole bunch of exotic flavours. Now Doritos are awesome.

Diet cola used to be awful. You could barely bring diet Coke and Pepsi to your lips. The aspartame taste was horrendous. Now a days, diet soda tastes almost the same as regular soda. They've really improved it.

Jake only eats ice cream.

If your child ate only ice cream would you let your child eat ice cream? Or would you ban your child from eating ice cream and have the doctor install a gastric tube into his stomach so that you could pump formula into your child's stomach?

I've asked this question to people and don't get a straight answer. The question is just too hard. People don't want their child only eating ice cream and they don't want their child fed with a g-tube. So I get lots of advice about how to get Jake to eat, but not an answer to the question.

Jake's in an "ice cream only" phase. He'll sit down and take a few bites of food and then sign "ice cream". If we don't give him ice cream, he cries and stops eating and drinking. We need to g-tube feed him.

With an average kid we'd just say, "Oh well you don't get to eat today." But Jake is very underweight and needs as many calories as possible. Not pumping him with milk would mean no energy for his next meal. That would mean no eating or drinking, indefinitely.

In other words Jake can go on a hunger strike to get what he wants. And we pretty much have to give in because he could do real damage to himself and his body. We've tried twice to starve him. Both times we had to end the experiment because he went 2 to 3 days without eating or drinking.

He doesn't care if he's starving or dehydrated. He hasn't properly learned to eat and associate food with satiation. And the doctors we've seen just don't have the expertise in this area.

So we hired a behaviourist who has had some success getting kids with autism to eat. Let's see how she does with Jake and his parents.