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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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