Valentine Daze

By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

In case you somehow didn't notice, the next commercial holiday, better yet official Hallmark Holiday (there is actually an official list of Hallmark Holidays), is upon us. This means lots of new business opportunities for your local Rite Aid, Walmart, Albertsons, Dollar Tree, and of course Macy's, Nordstrom's, etc., in case they didn't manage to empty your bank accounts last official holiday, i.e. Christmas/Hanukah, Kwanza, New Year’s (let's see, that would be what, about a month ago?).

Nicely timed at approximately four months from that October sugar fest, Halloween, you can now go all out once more to shower your loved one with future cavities, obesity, diabetes, and yet more $3 meaningless cards. And for your convenience, those once-coveted Cadbury chocolates will now be brought to you by the people who make fake cheese.

By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

We've all read and I have previously written some of the horror stories about what's happening to the rain forests being converted to beef ranches in our zeal to get yet more and bigger Big Macs packed onto our ever expanding waistlines and corporate bottom lines.

I've also written about a dozen good reasons not to drink soda, not that switching to bottled water is any any better (I've written about that as well). But here are about a billion more reasons not to drink soda—at least not at your favorite fast food emporium, especially if you can't resist all those unlimited refills and supersized cups they give you.

A recent study by scientists at Hollins University and published by the International Journal of Food Microbiology now reveals that 48% of the beverages dispensed contained fecal bacteria, including Coliform and E. coli (11%).

By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I recently met a woman who was working on preparing a food show for so-called vegans. I used to think vegans were sci-fi characters—aliens from Planet Vega. Maybe I wasn't that far off, not to offend anyone. But like perhaps PETA people, vegans do tend, it seems, towards being ideologues. And to me, ideology and food are not a good mix. I hate being preached to when I'm trying to enjoy a good meal. Especially about the rights and wrongs as to whether or not hogs have feelings, or corn has a soul (I have checked, and it does not!). It gives me indigestion. No doubt hogs do have feelings (and I do not take a position on this issue, by the way), but so do starving children in Haiti, and you have to eat something, and God did make us omnivores, whatever you may think or believe. Or if God didn't do it, Mother Nature did, because biologically speaking, omnivores we are.

By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

This being Martin Luther King Day, might be a good day to take a look back at history. From a consumer perspective, we have never been worse off than we are now, due to inequality and inequity in the marketplace, starting of course on Wall Street, following the course set by Madison Avenue, and ending uptown with the Big Banks. I'm not sure if Dr. King ever went to New York, but maybe he should have.

What he would have seen then, as now, was a mantra of greed overwhelming all other issues and attributes, human and otherwise. It was greed, of course, that led to slavery, and maintained it for four centuries. Who needs to work for a living if they can live the high life on somebody else's back? And religion should have put a stop to it, but that too fell to greed long before there were any colonies, including poor Haiti.

It is greed that dominates Congress today, and has handcuffed virtually every effort to bring justice, equity, and equality to the marketplace. It is greed that has prevented healthcare from becoming a service instead of an industry, ever since Teddy Roosevelt tried to clean it up. And of course, nobody has demonstrated more greed (arguably apart from the Big Banks) than Big Pharma.

By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Here's a cuddly story for you recent and future child-bearers: your kid may be a crawling chemo lab. The Environmental Working Group, with whom I've worked in the past (on my 2003 story for Worldwatch about perchlorates in most of our salads), has now come up with a new study about where all these chemical products and byproducts have ended up over the past few decades:

Us.

And now, our kids. Starting as fetuses, as I alluded to last week.

Nine out of ten randomly selected infants in a California hospital tested for chemical pathogens were found to have BPA in their systems, courtesy of their plastic baby bottles and food containers. BPA is an endocrine disruptor that imitates or duplicates the body‘s natural hormones with sometimes very damaging results.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Last year I posted a dispatch that included a note that warming up your car in winter is not a good idea. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it really makes a lot of sense. And since this misunderstood and overused practice has not abated in the interim (in fact it should not be done at all), the onset of winter once more warrants a reprisal.

The other day I was out with my wife enjoying our mild Seattle winter weather (the sun was actually shining and it was in the high 40s) when I noticed a neighbor—a young woman, as it happened—come out of her unit, walk to her car in the parking lot, start it up, and go back inside. I suppose her thinking was that she'd have a nice warm and cozy car to blow hot air up her skirt when she was good and ready to drive off to work or go shopping, or whatever. This is just the sort of thoughtlessness that has gotten the whole world in a heap of trouble the last century or so, especially the last decade or so of our “me first” and the heck with the rest of the world mindset.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

We all do it: overdo it. And if you haven't yet overdone it this year, you're overdue to do it. And if you haven't overdone it for Thanksgiving and Christmas, now's your last chance, what with New Years looming and all. Not that you need any prodding. The only notion more compelling than bidding a fond farewell a la “don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out” to the current year, is the eternal hope that maybe, just maybe, given yet another chance to get it right, we might finally do so. Hence all that optimism and all those silly pledges that so many of us make, those so-called “New Year's Vows” that are about as legitimate and valid as most people's, well, marriage vows.

Too late for World Peace this time around. Or even the end to the war(s), or the Great Recession. Peace on Earth? Dream on. Peace on Mars, maybe. And yet we still hope. And strive. And meanwhile, to get through the night, or at least New Year’s Eve, we overdo it. Too much of a good thing, we tell ourselves. So what? Moderation in all things should include moderation, right? Hell, that's my own credo. So we can and will look forward to one more year-end bender; one more extra slab of ham, or pie, or both; one more bottle of Merlot; one more argument with our conservative (or liberal) brethren; one more double dip of guacamole followed by chocolate chip; one more toast with somebody else's liqueur to celebrate whatever straw we're grasping for.

By Gene Ayres

One of my longtime favorite movies is practically a cliche to even mention these days, but I still love it, if only because it's so quaint: It's a Wonderful Life. I don't know if any George Baileys actually exist anymore, if they ever did, but I am definitely familiar with the Mr. Potter archetype, because he seems to be manifested in our national psyche now as a role model. Case in point, the national Chambers of Commerce, most of the seats in the United States Congress (or at least in their handlers and bosses), and what passes these days for representative government.

Welcome to Pottersville. It's where we live now. (Oh, and Merry Holiday of Your Choice, secular or otherwise, according to your beliefs and local regulations). And when you do go out on the town, just leave your name at the door please, for future harassment, spam, mailbox flyers, telemarketers, warrants, and solicitations on your way out.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I've mentioned before in previous dispatches that a lot of disturbing research is surfacing around the globe, indicating that cell phones may not be all that good for you. Or me. I know, I know, this comes under the category, particularly in this gift-seeking season, of sounding like, well, a curmudgeon. After all, cell phones are the greatest invention since, well, white bread. Or at least, since the PC, and we all love them to pieces.

For what that's worth, when Sir Walter Raleigh first showed up in the Queen's court from a sojourn to the Colonies with a boatload of New World produce, people at the time felt the same way about tobacco. Sometimes, the more we learn about something, the less appealing it might be. We're going through this painful transition as we speak with carbon-based energy and transportation vehicles. It's proving really hard (against huge deliberately placed obstacles legal and political worldwide) to make this change away from oil dependency to something that won't fry the planet, and we are resisting it with what might very well turn out to be every fiber of all our beings.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

The Holiday Season is upon us. And a lot of us use this as yet another good excuse to indulge, or perhaps overindulge, or, to apply my favorite maxim: moderation in all things. Including moderation.

For health reasons alone (and I feel so very righteous writing this!) I have one glass of wine every evening for dinner (OK, OK, sometimes two on weekends and, well, Holidays). The French have been doing this since they were, well, French, and they are way healthier than we are, even with all that horrible national health insurance they're stuck with.

By Colleen Rothe

One of my kids’ favorite breakfasts is frozen toaster waffles. They are particularly fond of the Kellogg’s brand. I make them eat the healthier variety of the product, although I still balk at its ingredients, but our little town’s grocery store hasn’t had the healthier choice. The teenager at the checkout just shrugged and said they didn’t get any in. I wasn’t too concerned about it; I found another brand, which was less expensive and I thought had a better taste. But my Eggo-eating brood was too curious to let the questions remain unanswered. Today, we found out why the store was lacking.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

This week, with a gasp of relief, I'm happy to move on from the excretory to the exhausted exhilarating exhalations of exasperation with exfoliates. And stuff. This week marks the 32nd Great American Smokeout, as if anyone was paying attention, since such a commemoration is likely to be just about as successful as a plea to, say, politicians to repent and start being honest and responsive to their voting constituents instead of just their rich and powerful friends—namely Corporate America.

Getting people to give up smoking, especially given that it is driven by one of the most powerful addictive substances in the world, is of course not an easy task. But I'll take a shot at it, because smoking killed my father, and he wasn't even a smoker. He worked for 40 years at AT&T, a then-progressive company that provided numerous benefits to its employees, none of which, unfortunately, included a smoke-free environment. Not even, in my father's case, in your own office, because he was a mid- level executive with a private secretary: one who, unfortunately, smoked. I guess it never occurred to Dad to replace her with one who didn't smoke, or ask her to do it elsewhere. Those notions had just not come into fruition yet. Years later, I was heavily involved in the struggle and campaign, first with airlines, then later (against much heavier resistance) with restaurants and retail spaces, for the right to breathe clean (or relatively clean) air not contaminated by somebody else's pollution. We started in New York, then Los Angeles and the Bay Area in California, and thanks to the Surgeon General's warning way back in the 60s, it began to work. As for Big Tobacco, it became increasingly difficult to deny, let alone gloss over, the fact that half a million Americans were dying from smoking every year, and that was just those who actually smoked and didn't include those who got emphysema and pneumonia from constant exposure to often thick clouds of so-called “sidestream” smoke everywhere they went. Like my father.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

You had to see it coming, didn't you? How else to follow up on a story about the amazing power potential of pee, than with one about poo? And I don't mean as in Winnie the. Granted I may have thrown you a curveball with my hint at the end of last week's dispatch, “Next time: methane.” But this is but a feint, a side step, in truth, because methane is very much a byproduct of waste, human and animal and otherwise. It too is a very useful energy source and could be competitive with natural gas, and maybe, for the same reasons alluded to last week, it isn't going to go away any time soon, given its source (we, the human race, all our crap in all senses and forms, plus all that of our domestic mega-herds). The average American landfill repository of all that junk we consumers toss, just oozes with methane. Like at that cool dinosaur fossil pit in L.A., it is literally bubbling out of the ground. And it burns just like gas, natural or otherwise.

By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

You'd almost think we were swimming in the stuff. First came that Off-Broadway hit, Urinetown, which made the subject downright trendy, and somehow garnished a heap of rewards, if not rashes. And for those who survived Katrina, or who swim regularly in, say, Lake Washington (where more than once I have watched mothers empty their young children's bladders into said lake), maybe you are. Or will be. Urine is everywhere, like it or not, we all produce a lot of it every day (granted some more than others) and just flushing it out of sight is proving less and less viable as a method of disposal.

Granted, it is a completely natural impulse to get rid of the stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible. Urine, of course, is not something we generally want to keep around, for obvious olfactory and other sensory, health-related, and aesthetic reasons. Anyone remember that nationwide drought in the ‘80s? We were all supposed to take fewer showers and there was a slogan we were supposed to use on bumper stickers in regards to flushing and when not to that I won't repeat here.

By Colleen Rothe

By now you are all probably tired of me saying to plan in advance to save money. But that really is the best advice anyone can give. Anything last minute is going to cost big bucks. The point of Thanksgiving is about gratefulness and spending much needed time with family, not emptying the bank account for a giant meal.

Additionally, experts are spouting that nearly 20 percent of Americans who traveled last year will be staying home. That may mean a couple more folks around your holiday table. So the time to start saving is now.