GOT TO START SOMEWHERE...

 

GOT TO START SOMEWHERE…

 

As soon as I graduated from high school, I went to the Army recruiting station to sign up. After I got tested and qualified, I was told to report for a physical. At that time, I weighed 112 pounds. You had to weight at least 120 to get approved. Fortunately, the corpsman who gave the physicals lived a couple of houses away from us and passed me on through. He told me I would put on weight after I got in the Army.

Well, he was certainly right about that. I am now at least 25 or 30 pounds heavier than I would like to be and like many of you I must fight on a daily basis to keep from gaining more and more.

What I do know is that when I was in elementary school and high school, we did not have any fat or obese kids. We also did not have any kids with allergies to milk, gluten, sugar, peanuts or shrimp. We ate everything. But we did not have any ‘fast’ food or snacks as we have today.

In 1980 the obesity rate in this country was 15%, not much higher than when I graduated from high school. Today, the rate in our country is 40% and climbing.

We stopped seeing advertisements for cigarettes in January of 1971 and tobacco sales started dropping. After 1971, the tobacco companies started buying up the major food companies such as Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco. There is a lot of documentation on how the tobacco companies started researching ways to keep us craving the food products they produce.

Now we have a new man on the job in the image of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has shaken up a goodly portion of the country by eliminating junk food from being purchased using food stamps. The government is issuing out some 405 million dollars a day to food stamp programs. The fraud rate for food stamps is 11%...that means that 1 out of every $9 is wasted on fraud. Not very efficient if you ask me.

So, Kennedy has put the kibosh on fat snacks much to the hue and cry of many consumers. “Where will I get my chips and cookies and my soft drinks if I can’t use my food stamps?” well, you may have to use your own money and not ours (taxpayers) and you may have to learn to live on foods that are healthiest for us rather than because they taste good.

Obesity is not good for any of us (including me) it leads to multiple issues such as heart disease, diabetes, strokes and the like. We all know it, we all have known it and are now being faced with the fact that someone needed to stand up and do something to help us to not only help our children but ourselves as well.

Kudos to Secretary Kennedy for stepping forward and taking that first giant step toward helping us get this nationwide epidemic under control. It hurts me to say that carrots and celery are much better for me (and for you) than a cookie.

But you know, I’m right.

See you next week….Peary Perry

AH, SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE…

 

AH, SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE….

As you are probably aware I am a man of many talents. One of which is finding answers to rather obscure questions you have always wanted to ask but never knew where you could find the information.

Well, I am here to introduce you to a new character in my blogs, say hello to Mr. Answerman.

My first question of the day comes from Mr. Vigil Ackermann of Westover, Iowa who wants to know…”What happens to the old bananas in the grocery store?”.

“Well, Mr. Ackermann….these are either sold to companies that use them for baking, given to charities or just  dumped in the trash.”

I hope that cleared that one up…

Our next question is from Miss. Idabel Dunkenschmidt of Port Oasis, Nevada who asks…” What happens to the old flowers in the grocery store?”.

Mr. Answerman responded with this: Well,  Miss. Dunkenschmidt ….these are either sold to companies that use them for funerals, given to charities or just dumped in the trash.

Our final question of the day comes to us from across the pond from a Mr. Archie Piebald of West Hampton Courts on the Green, Surrey who asks ..” How come when I go to turn on a lamp in my living room, the on/off knob is always in the back of the lamp, making it difficult to reach”.

Mr. Answerman replied with .. ‘No comment.”

So much for that part of today. The rest of today is about our use of expiration dates on foods that we buy. Is it really necessary to use them by the ‘best used’ date or before the ‘expiration’  date?

This is a discussion that goes on and on in millions of households throughout the world except in Iran, where it is against the law to eat or drink anything sanitary., according to Google and Facebook. But here in America, most men will drink milk that is still able to be poured as a liquid out of the container. If it becomes solid enough, they know that sooner or later it will become cheese. That is if only their wives will allow them to wait long enough. Lifelong bachelors manage to survive just fine using this cost and time saving tool. They also know that you can leave half eaten uncovered cans of chili in the refrigerator for over 5 days before the fuzz starts growing on the top. Penicillin was discovered this way by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928 when his wife left him for 3 months to take care of her aging mother.

I am of the firm belief that if the can is still intact (not swollen or open) than eating it will produce no harm, no foul. I along with many of my friends have eaten off of the food carts in small rural towns in Mexico and we are still alive. I think this kind of builds your resistance and immunity to various diseases. Your comments and thoughts are welcome on this matter.

See you next week, Peary Perry

LET'S TALK-----

 

LET’S TALK….

First off, let’s get the Labor Day holiday greeting out of the way. Summer is over, the kids are back in school, traffic is bad in school zones, watch your time and speed carefully. We have one more big holiday to BBQ and stuff ourselves before it’s time for the holiday season. I am already seeing Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations in the stores. Is nothing sacred any longer?

You have to look back at old photos from the early 1900’s and late 1800’s to notice that no one smiled. That’s because they were tired. We didn’t have any so called ‘labor’ saving devices such as we do now. They had to make their own cheese and butter. Ice cream required churning a wooden tub full of ice for hours. You couldn’t just go the store and buy a gallon of it.

Think about it, most of you reading this blog are the last generation to have lived before the advent of social media. I call this era BSM, meaning ‘before social media’. Your parents and grandparents and perhaps you as well had to actually talk to people instead of texting, emailing or Instagram-ing (sp?) them. It was hard to use real words. Some of you may have had to actually turn a crank in the door of your car to roll down a window. Oh, the tragedy of it all.

Your grandparents and surely your great grandparents probably went through the depression and World War II. Food, gasoline, rubber, clothes were all rationed, and their news came via a radio (AM only) and newspapers. And they most likely had to walk 10 miles to school each day, uphill, through the snow all year around. Or so you were told.

Now we get upset if our computer doesn’t load fast enough or we only have one bar on our cell phone.

I actually found some old road maps the other day. Remember those? I’d like to know how many marriages were saved with the advent of GPS in our cars. I bet map rage was the cause of many, many divorces in this country. Think about this….if Moses had GPS he would not have wandered around the desert for 40 years. Notice he did not stop at anytime and ask directions. Men don’t ask for directions, they just put the pedal to the metal and race off in some direction, right or wrong. “I may be lost, but we’re making great time, aren’t we?”

Old people living in the BSM period also had actual photo albums where you could open them up and look at pages upon pages of little Jimmy swimming, diving, fishing, cooking, camping, driving, studying, along with 300 other photos of him from the cradle to his retirement from Pespi Corp. Now in today’s world, the SMG (social media generation) keep their 78,000 photos of little Zenon and Dorthia on their cell phones where you have to wait until they scroll back in time to the event, they wish you to see. So much faster than just flipping the pages of an album marked ‘kids’.  

But look on the bright side, you’ve got the internet, voicemail, robots, artificial intelligence, microwave and URL’s.

What’s not to love?

See you next week…Peary Perry