Rant… but completely justified.
I ordered some things from Joann Fabrics, nothing spectacular, but some items that had been closed out of my nearby store (which have been pretty popular for my http://memory-beads.com website) and I thought i would order some before they were totally unavailable.
These were several strings of metal “open angel” charm beads which I end up putting polymer clay and flower petal mixture into.
So the shipping for these items was horrendous, I almost didn’t purchase them because of shipping costs… and when the box arrived…. I was so dumbfounded that they would put items (shown in my pix) which would have easily slipped into a 4 x 6 bubble mailing envelope into a box of 5″ x 12″ by 18″.. and filled it with the air pouches, which of course did nothing for keeping the items in place as they were off in the corner anyway.
How ridiculous: no body home in management? no body thinking about the planet and conservation? no body thinking about land fill; no body thinking about space and freight; Anybody home at Joann Fabrics online mailing service?

This is a phrase (if memory serves me right, and i will check) it was Lays  maybe even before Frito’s became Frito Lay.  It was cute and catchy and its purpose was to make you think, by mental manipulation, you cannot stop eating their product.  It is meant too, to physically addict you, salt refined sugars and fat (and yes even glutamines).

What is perplexing is that in all the data that has been presented that being obese is correlated (and of course i said correlated not causes, though in my heart i think it is causality) with western diseases, which continually plague americans: heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, immune disorders.

What is different about today’s diet is that it is consumed without regard for what is necessary, and what is healthful. It is consumed because someone knew you would eat it, because they stacked the cards against you, they added all those things which make you eat more than one.  Shame on big food companies.

I wonder if they are in ca-hoots with big pharma… afterall the obesity epidemic spikes the western diseases and no one wants to “eat just one” so they would rather “take a pill” than get their behinds off the sofa and run around the block, or heaven forbid, take up a sport that takes some energy and coordination and teamwork.

WHo is to blame for the obesity epidemic? Well ultimately it is the consumer, but the consumer has to have iron-will to avoid what is deliberately out there to addict him.

I googled “bet you cant eat just one” and up came 4 million posts.  not-so ha ha.

Here is some real science
DiPatrizio NV1, Astarita G, Schwartz G, Li X, Piomelli D. Endocannabinoid signal in the gut controls dietary fat intake. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Aug 2;108(31):12904-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1104675108. Epub 2011 Jul 5.
Abstract begins thusly: “Oral sensory signals drive dietary fat intake, but the neural mechanisms underlying this process are largely unknown.”

Reposting one site: soleiletoile/flickr  read it here

I just now felt compelled to rant about the “time” factor and what we assume equates with “validity” in science.  Is a publication ‘good’ if it is more than a few nanoseconds old? do we disregard it as being nonsense if it was published 50 years ago?  Good grief, even those things published 15 years ago, part of this new century, could be considered old.

There is subconscious bias of “time” and “exclusion” in our current social climate. This applies to “breaking news” and “breaking science”. Are those observations more valid because they are ten milliseconds old, and how many second will they be current, and how many minutes till they are considered ‘old and out of date’?.

This ‘time’ bias is also seen in- (and maybe it is just spill-over)  from- the current culture of “youth”, ie, unless it is under 20, it cannot be beautiful, unless it is mobile-friendly, it is rejected by google, unless it moves at warp factor 9 through a jillion high impact image accompanied by blaring noise, it is old school.

I reject this. For tens of thousands of years “man” in the inclusive and broadest sense of the word, has been forming ideas, recording data, and in essence, making scientific discoveries. That we pass these observations off as inconsequential, nonsense, and valueless, because they are old is the worst type of unmerited egotism. This behavior spreads the idiotic notion of “i am worth it” (which of course suggests that one thinks one’s self and one’s thoughts are of more value than others (but no one is worth more than another)) off into the world of real science. Such as, “unless it is recently published it is useless”.  This is pure egotism fueled by the explosion of public-written, self published articles, immediate dissemination of text and images (fact and alternative fact).

There is a wealth of information, old, dusty, archived, well thought out science (and history)– the trick is not to trade it in for new, spiffy, swirrling color data without first checking it out.

Kroger has received several calls from me about packaging errors. These have been about Private Selection frozen cherries and small bags of Private Selection frozen blueberries, and also about their low fat cream cheese.

Packaging errors are serious. They put the public at risk for disease. Food borne illnesses cause inconvenience, pain and rarely can cause death and are not something to ignore. If i complain to Kroger they need to listen, do they, well, listening vs doing something are very different things.

The latest packaging error was Private Selection blueberries (the 3 lb bag) which you will see by the pictures below (inside and out) had two very big holes where the seal for the bottom of the bag somehow was not made.  I didn’t notice until most of the blueberries were eaten, I began to see blueberry juice on the bottom shelf of my freezer, then one day blueberries began dropping out the bottom of the bag.  What is the bottom line:  IF THINGS CAN GET OUT>>> THEN THINGS CAN GET IN. In this case the holes were big enough for small animals – not so LOL. Their comment on the phone included a coupon, which is NOT what was appropriate, but an investigation into the quality control of the packaging plant where it was processed is what was required.  Do I have any hope for that, well, not really.

Adding this post still weeks afer I called Kroger, and we have another 3 lb bag of Private Selection Frozen Blueberries with a hole in the bag.  This one is not completely open as above, but I found it the same way, just drip drip of blue berry water out the hole.  They should respond. This is a health hazard. Will they respond… their fix for the last notifcation was to try to buy me off with a new bag of blueberries…. which by the way was this one, with another hole…. poetic… yes.

Bet you can’t eat just one.  Who perpetrates that kind of debilitating and for-profit advertising.  This has been around for half a century… bad on you Frito-Lay.

One of the reasons this tends to be a self fulfilling prophecy is that the brain just craves (and craves more) salt fat and sugar — the “satiety quick fix”.I bet you can’t eat just one carrot, or broccoli floret, or radish, said no one ever.  Why? because over the millenia of environment – good health interactions, we have grown up with the good things to eat.  They don’t turn us into mindless food addicts.

the food rules of thumb  —  ha ha just thinking out loud here

if it was picked 2 weeks, months or years ago it was green and may be tasteless
if your orange is very orange, it was probably dyed
if you tomato is very red, it was probably ripened with ethylene oxide
if it doesn’t rot, its not going to be that nutritious
if mice and rats won’t eat it, its not food
if it turns brown it has lost its antioxidant value
if it is a fruit, after being picked it cannot ripen, it can only rot
if it is a root or tuber, it very well may improve with age
if it is stressed, it will give you less than optimal nutrition (veggie fruit or meat)
if it is white, it has few polyphenols and phytonutrients
if it is purple, it probably has lots of phytonutrients
if you peel it, in many cases you lose the valuable parts
if you burn it, you create carcinogens
if you boil it, sometimes you make it better (carrots) sometimes worse
if you eat it alone you miss other nutrients that help with digestion and absorption
if you eat a very small variety of food you will be minimally nourished
if it makes you sick, or itchy, don’t eat it again
if you take a vitamin — don’t be fooled into thinking you are nourished
if you calculate gut surface area, food is your largest environmental interface
if you eat anything, you are feeding your microbiome
if you are kind to your microbiome, you will be healthier