The Rage Diaries

This could be a very good idea

McDonald’s Corp. is offering a money management program to its more than 500,000 unit-level employees in the United States, company officials said Thursday.

McDonald’s partnered with Visa Inc. to offer the “McDonald’s Practical Money Skills” program, which includes a budgeting guide to track expenses and access to an instructional video and an online resource center at www.practicalmoneyskills.com/mcdonalds. The materials, which are also available in Spanish, are based on Visa’s financial education program, "Practical Money Skills for Life."

-- "McD Offers Budget Advice to Workers," Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 4, 08

Given the paucity of personal-finance classes in most U.S. public school systems, and given the tremendously diverse nature of much of McDonald's workforce, this could end up being a very good way to educate several different segments of American society. I've been poking around the online resources, and they include a budgeting journal and some helpful loan calculators.

I'll be curious to see how McDonald's promotes the program among its employees -- it's one thing to offer it, but another to make your teenaged workforce think realistically about money.

Pick-a-fight Friday ... Fast food. Yes or no?

For the past two-and-a-half months, my Mondays and Wednesdays have been crazy: I work all day, ferry home, sprint across the island, cook and gulp down dinner, fling on a Speedo, then sprint back across the island to lifeguard night-time lap swim. This last Wednesday, the delicious pizza Phil was preparing wasn't ready in time for me to have any before I hit the pool, so I sped out the door and hit McDonald's for dinner. Total cost of my meal: $1.83. I paid for it using the change in our car.

Now, I'm pretty good with our food budget, but I am not good enough to get us down to an average cost of $1.83 per person per meal. As I ate my hamburger and watched the lone lap swimmer scream in surprise upon jumping into the icy depths of the outdoor pool ... for a moment, I was like, Why do I bother? Why do I bother tracking grocery prices, or shopping loss leaders during weekly sales? Why do I beat myself up over buying turkey bacon full price when I could just ditch any consideration of balanced nutrition and feed myself for $6 a day at McDonald's?

Then I remembered I liked vegetables and the moment passed. But it did raise a question. Like many other people, I have spouted the "Just bring your lunch to work!" party line without question. I've done the calculations for food budgeting based on premises like, "Well, if I'm eating lunch, I'm eating at Cafe Centro, and that's seven bucks a pop" or "If we're eating dinner out, it's at Toomie's, so we're looking at $35 for the two of us." And then, yeah, it's cheaper to buy groceries and eat in.

But if you throw McDonald's into the equation ... well, it's a different argument.

So my pick-a-fight-Friday topic, the one that's been bouncing around in my head since I picked up dinner on Wednesday night, is this: Fast food -- a way to stretch the food budget, or something to be avoided as a regular part of your economic diet?

Quickly returning to Slow Food

This past weekend was the Slow Food Nation wingding in the city. We did not go: I was busy wrestling my indecently fecund tomato plants into submission and scheming about the placement of the raised beds so I can start my winter greens. Also, I feared that attending would ignite my contrarian streak. I could see myself bolting for the nearest McDonald's, then dancing on the periphery of the festival, popping McNuggets into my mouth and shouting, "Mmm! Factory farming and processed beyond recognition! It tastes like America!"

But I did read a fairly eye-opening article in San Francisco magazine, "Slow Food Was Here." I was not filled with admiration for the movement:

[Slow Food Founder Carlo]  Petrini’s diary entry sprays acid on the [San Francisco Ferry Building] market. He describes his first Dantelike descent into the Saturday throng in 2003, with Waters as guide, through a hell ring of glamorous poseurs, “most of whom seemed to be actresses whose social status was pretty clear: either wealthy or very wealthy.” He saves his heftiest scorn for a few slacker sellers, “amiable ex-hippies and young dropouts turned farmers.” One grower gouges the rich buyers bagging up his squashes so he can “spend hours surfing on the beach.” Petrini hints at the invisible underclass of farm laborers who toil to pick this high-priced swag for their dude masters, and who themselves are forced to eat at fast-food joints. It’s a portrait of a place that had perverted the all-inclusive, worker-centric goals of the organization Petrini helped found 20 years earlier in Bra, a town in northwest Italy with the size and humble vibe of Benicia.

[...]

Though talking heads inside—and in favor of—the organization have grown tired of the knee-jerk charge of elitism, a nuanced critic like Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, is hard to ignore. As he describes in his book Stuffed and Starved, Slow Food in the States has chosen mostly to ignore the social-justice component of Petrini’s message, essentially becoming an exclusive dining club—at the same time protesting that it’s anything but. High-profile events like the Golden Glass (an annual wine-tasting event in San Fran­cisco that’s an important fundraiser for the city’s 700-­member Slow Food convivium, or chapter) only reinforce the notion of an organization content to speak the language of high-ticket pursuits. At the very least, the event’s organizers seem deaf to the irony of floating the word golden to promote a group sensitive to the charge that it exists primarily for the gilded class. The fundraiser might as well be called the Jewel-Encrusted Chalice.

[...]

It’s not just that poor families are priced out of the occasional restaurant splurge. It’s also that quotidian groceries are held out as eco-gastronomic exemplars of good and clean. Patel recently took a documentary film crew to the Ferry Building. He wanted to see what he could buy for $21, the weekly allowance for someone on welfare. “We man­aged to get six eggs, a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese, and six tomatoes, and that was it,” he says.

By the way, tickets to the Slow Food Nation festival started at $45.

Anyway, there's that article, which illustrates pretty well the wide gulf between lofty aspiration and the gritty reality of who produces or consumes food. And then there's my friend Stephanie's experience volunteering with Slow Food Nation this weekend. In "Something is Rotten in the State of the Nation," she shares her hair-raising experience and concludes:

Next time you do an event, Slow Food Nation, take better care of the people who turned out to help spread your message. We may not have been "paying guests" in the monetary sense, but we paid with our time, energy, and goodwill and we deserved to be accorded the same respect as those forking over cold hard cash. This was a high-profile chance to show a whole mess of people that you are better than the average food industry expo, and in some ways you did. In other ways, you really didn't.

I wonder what Carlo Petrini would have had to say about it.

The thing that set me off today, part the second

My mistake was reading this on my morning communte:

Seneca Klassen, co-founder of Bittersweet Cafe in Oakland, and now in San Francisco and Danville, was given the touchy job of choosing the chocolate-makers who will be featured at the Taste Pavilions, a 50,000-square-foot food exhibition at Fort Mason. Only five made the cut - all from outside California.

Klassen said their products best met the Slow Food criteria of "good, clean and fair," meaning that the chocolate is not only delicious but is sustainably produced by workers who are fairly paid.

The chocolate also is expensive, about $50 to $60 a pound, Klassen said. But Shawn Askinosie, whose Askinosie Chocolate of Springfield, Mo., will be showcased at the pavilion, said he has no trouble selling his bars in the Bay Area. In fact, this is his best market.

-- "Slow Food Nation Opens Friday in SF," SFChron, Aug 26, 08

And -- shocker -- I am not at all exercised about the pricey chocolate.

The excerpt above is just a taste of the whole article, in which people who make a lot of money peddling slow-food products to people with a lot of money all express confusion at the idea that some folks might find the whole slow-food movement to be, oh, I don't know, a tad precious and pricey for the rest of us peasants.

Y'all know I am a big fan of eating local and farmer's markets. And last night, for dinner, we had a thyme-roasted chicken (I grew the thyme) and heirloom tomato salad (I grew that too). So, in theory, we're right in the demographic sweet spot for this festival.

Except I find this kind of pedigreed eating to be completely offputting and staggeringly ineffective from a strategic perspective. It is super-easy to be all "Rah rah local food!" when you live here in the Bubble, because we live someplace with A) great, year-round growing weather, B) a wide variety of arable landscapes, and C) decent animal protein sources nearby. But these people nattering on about the honest purity of chocolate zucchini bread in which you've grown the courgettes and milled the whole-grain flour yourself are completely missing the bigger issues. Namely, that America's a big freakin' nation and some of it has nasty weather or inhospitable soil.

Oh, I long for the day that slow food types stop thrilling to the idea that eating local makes you a more thoughtful person and start thrilling to the idea that maybe, it should include boring practical things. Things like figuring out how to build local demand and support for greenhouses in chilly climates, and how to build those structures so they work reliably and provide fresh produce in January at competitive prices. Or things like persuading people that canning and freezing are ubiquitous seasonal activities, on par with fireworks on July 4th or fantasy football drafts in August. Or things like figuring out how people will eat locally after their crops have been devastated by a hurricane or early frost.

When the slow-food types stop saying things like "We need to go to the red states to people who celebrate traditional values." (Actual quote from the article! I KNOW!) and start working to address the practical realities of how we eat across the country, maybe I'll stop foaming at the mouth whenever I read articles like the one above.

What drives me batty about foodie media

So Phil and I were sacked out on the couch the other night, and our TiFaux did deliver unto us the Good Eats episode "Tuna, Surprise." I was pleased, as I currently have twelve 6-oz cans of Starkist in the pantry and am open to finding things to do with them above and beyond the old standard tuna salad.

Sadly, I am still bereft of ideas. The episode focused on Alton advocating that we ditch the humble can for either the pricey tuna-in-a-pouch or the even more pricey tuna-imported-from-Italy. (How pricey, you ask? One four-ounce tin costs $17; I picked up ninety ounces of tuna packed in water -- i.e. fifteen times the quantity -- from Costco for a mere $9.)

This episode stands out as an anomaly, because Good Eats has provided us with many, many great recipes that do not require pricey or hard-to-find ingredients. It has been one of the happy exceptions of foodie media insofar as I am concerned. Our local food section often includes recipes that call for things that can only be mail-ordered, purchased on an installment plan, or procured up in Yreka on the first Sunday of the month between two and four p.m.

Pragmatism is good for the American diet

So a few days ago, I read this post, "Localvores at Walmart?" on WMT's in-house blog, Check Out. The gist of the post is this:

[O]ver the past two years, Walmart’s partnerships with local farmers have grown by 50 percent, and fruits and vegetables grown in any given store’s state now make up over a fifth of what’s available during summer months.  Now, statistics like this are nice, but its particularly cool when you see the results…a few examples:

Until recently, all of the fresh cilantro sold in Walmart stores was sourced from California. Then, Ron’s merchants found a grower named Duda Farms, and soon we started sourcing cilantro from Belle Glade, Florida for distribution in the eastern US.  Introducing Florida-grown cilantro resulted in an estimated savings of 250,000 food miles in a single season.

I liked the post because it was a nice look at how businesses can balances practices that boost their bottom line against practices that are good for the planet.

One year down

On Saturday, June 23, 2007, I finished a cup of coffee around 10 a.m., left Ole's and got into a car accident. It was a heck of a way to say goodbye to caffeine.

 I've gone a year without caffeine -- no pick-me-ups after red-eye flights, no heart-starting beverage first thing in the morning, no cold and fizzy fountain drinks on hot road trips, no after-dinner cappuccinos in the dim and luxurious quiet of a good restaurant. In return: I sleep better, my dentist no longer sighs when she sees me, my heartburn's diminished, I rest reassured that I don't depend on something to feel like I'm working at the top of my faculties.

That's why I quit: I got tired of being the woman with a Diet Coke can permanently welded to her hand. I wanted to see if I had the willpower to walk away from something I had leaned on a little too much; I wanted to see what, if any changes, I'd have to make for the better.

The flip side, of course, is that I really have a hard time when I'm physically bushwhacked. It's like the sleepytime version of Flowers for Algernon: I can feel my problem-solving skills and emotional resilience diminishing with each yawn. This has made me much more sympathetic to toddlers, what with their own need for regular sleep and typical abstention from caffeine. I just wish meltdowns weren't so damned undignified for the over-3 set.

What if I don't want to be what I eat?

I like to read two or more books at a time, and the two I just finished reading  seem weirdly complimentary: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Once I got past the situational amusement of the book by the non-chef including recipes while the book by the chef most decidedly did not, I realized that the two are united by a common belief that beats beneath each chapter: what we choose to eat, how we choose to prepare it and why we made these choices all reflect who we are.

Animal + vegetable != miracle

My tomatoes are doing beautifully. I have four plants -- two brandywine, one green zebra and one yellow plum -- across two raised beds, and they are now so hearty and vigorous, I've had to stake them to the skeleton of a vandalized "Yes on H" sign someone stuck in our yard.

(Side digression: Alameda's about to vote on Measure H, which would tax homeowners to make up a massive school budget shortfall. People who dig the prop have been putting signs in their yard. However, we can home last Friday and found that someone had stuck a "Yes on H" sign in our yard with a big, black "NO" spray-painted across it. Anyway, I huffily recycled the sign but kept the the metal frame for it. Thank you, vandals, for saving me the cost of a tomato cage.)

Because I had some room left over in the raised beds, I figured I'd do some co-planting. I have some French breakfast radishes coming up in one bed. But alas, in the other ... I have a pile of dirt and a suspicious hollow. There are no green onions coming up, because Zito has apparently been peeing on them. I've scooped out the dirt and have a screen over the bed now to prevent our idiot cat from jumping back in there, but still ... if it's not one thing in the garden, it's another. (At left: the pissy culprit lolls in "his" chair, which is parked in our garage instead of at the dump where it ought to be. He has no reason to look as irritated as he does.)

I can only imagine my headache if I really committed to urban homesteading, like these people:

Fiscal fitness -- the grocery reckoning

This post is a few days late because I normally leave the grocery receipt in the car, and forgot to bring it in until today. But I did promise youall numbers and a look at what we're spending on food and where.