Program Note: I will be on Matt Binder’s DOOMED podcast today (Saturday) at 1 PM eastern

I’ve been listening to DOOMED off an on and it’s a solid podcast. His interviews with Krang T. Nelson and Nathan Robinson were nothing short of awesome. The interview with the ex-Turning Point USA employee was interesting insofar as its a glimpse behind the curtain of L’il Chuckie Kirk’s astroturf organization, but kinda wish Matt would have pushed back on the “I’m for free market capitalism” bullshit she occasionally engaged in.

In fact, along with Rebecca Watson and Amanda Marcotte, Binder was one of the folk that woke me up with how bad things were for women online with his old Public Shaming feed (it was either Twitter or Tumblr, but I can’t remember which). Back when Steubenville happened, Binder was simply retweeting or reposting the awful tweets that blamed the victim for her own sexual assault (and these people wonder where #MeToo came from). And that well was just bottomless; tweet after tweet of these people, just a non-stop victim blaming tsunami. That handful of cases happening around the same time in 2012 was when the scales kinda fell from my eyes as to how entrenched the misogyny in society really was, and that was two years before GamerGate.

Binder also catalogued entitled dillholes that mocked welfare recipients for not having jobs, but then found themselves unemployed and crying about not having jobs. Self-awareness, what name so?

I guess Pug left without even the courtesy of a funny flounce. Boo!

I think he was actually here attempting to gotcha us into disparaging 1in6 and/or male sexual abuse survivors. When nobody did anything like that, he kind of had no other option but to flail around.

@Surplus;

There’s no official, explicit reason for that happening, but – well, I’m afraid there’s a strong case to be made for “neoliberal corporate overlords wanting all of your money.” They have every incentive to bake bread in such a way that it goes bad quickly. If you’re throwing out bread, it means you’re buying it more often. Up here in Canada we already know they’re price-fixing cartel bosses, so it’s not so much a leap of logic as it is a side-step from the existing evidence.

Planned obsolescence has struck every part of our world, even bread! It really is a blight, driven entirely by capitalist greed. Was introduced as a concept in the 30’s by a guy named Bernard London as a plan to end the Depression. He wanted it to be government enforced – if you wore your shoes longer than the state-mandated Shoe Lifespan, you’d have to pay a tax! He argued it was like an estate tax, but one the government could collect while you were alive. So yeah, authoritarian ultra-garbage.

Then after the war, US manufacturers glommed onto the idea as a design philosophy to encourage consumption. This wasn’t state controlled but instead was a means of funneling more money into corporate hands through advertising. Add a bit over half a century and you get where we are now, with bread that goes bad before you can finish the damn loaf.

Bread freezes really well, though. Take half of your loaf, pop it in a second bread bag and put it in the freezer. When you’ve almost finished the first half, take the second half and leave it out with the bag open but tucked in under itself – just enough for the excess moisture to escape. The front slice might be dry but the rest should be fine.

I hope that works! Down with the corporate destroyers, etc, etc.

@ Surplus,

Put bread in the freezer!

@ Kat already beat me to it, but I will add that I do this from the get go.
As soon as I buy bread – it goes directly into the freezer.

I’m single and economical too. You can also freeze milk. I really only use it for coffee and some cooking, I buy a gallon, I divide it up in to smaller containers to be used as needed. When you start to run low on your fridge milk, then you get out a frozen container about a day or two ahead so it can thaw (in the fridge).

This is a good $ saver. I just got some milk, it was $3 a gallon. But the cheapest half gallon was $2.79, so yeah, get the gallon.

I can find it cheaper too, I have to really plan the shopping now, since my car is still wonky. I shop all the cheap stores and cook. Aldi’s, everyone knows Aldi’s, I also shop the discount food stores around here, dollar store for other cheap stuff, I’m very economical.

I do cook, and I’m a pretty good cook :), I also make simple things such as some muffins from mix, oatmeal cookies, just made a batch of these the other day, point –> other ‘bread like things” can be frozen, too.

This time I cut the batch of cookies in half and the rest are in the fridge. I’m kind of obsessive about certain things in the fridge because I’m phobic of “germs” and molds (thanks for reminding me! 😀 ) and what have you.

I keep all pasta and rice in the fridge.

Freeze the bread! I buy it, it goes RIGHT INTO the freezer. To be taken out as needed. White bread, nut bread, French bread, buns and rolls, muffins, I freeze all of these things.

And take out and let warm up as needed. No, I don’t have a microwave, either. I don’t eat a lot of meat, some, might be included in dishes easily thawed and reheated, or a small piece of frozen chicken can be baked straight away pretty quick. Other things can be thawed in a pan of hot water. If this is done properly (the interested can find instructions online), and then cooked right away, there is not time for any bad bacteria to build up. And of course common sense would tell you that you can’t leave a piece of meat or fish lying on the counter for 10 hours or anything.

I like to cook 🙂 and even with simple things, box mixes, it’s not that hard and you can save a lot of money too.

I met several neighbor friends through this too, people who like to cook outside, BBQ, it’s a topic of discussion and you can meet people through this too.

And as one of my friends pointed out too, two things: Ready made foods have a lot of “chemicals” in them. Even that store muffin mix, or mashed potato or stuffing mix, has a lot less chemicals and preservatives in it. It might not be “from scratch”, but it’s a start.

And the excess packaging. You, and the environment, are paying for that. How about a $4 pack of 4 muffins, from the store, the one store I go to has a bakery, but a lot of their stuff is shipped in from elsewhere. And even if nearby, it has to have more preservatives in it to hold up. And then these 4 muffins are in a big, clear plastic, clam shell, container.

Or, you could get a package of muffin mix, ranging anywhere from 50 cents to $2, which you just have to add a few other things to, and which produces 6 – 12 muffins.

Easy to make, too. Same with cake mixes. Make a cake, it’s easy. Instead of buying snack cakes and cookies or whatever. And you can cut that up and freeze portions of it too. You can easily get 8 servings out of this, which probably work out to 50 cents each.

I will quit here, just some ideas I had on ways to save 🙂

They have every incentive to bake bread in such a way that it goes bad quickly.

Um. I’m late to this discussion but why would it be good for them that the stores can’t keep their product on the shelf for longer?

The sell by date isn’t “it will become inedible at this exact moment” it’s “if the consumer protection agencies find you selling it you’ll be so fined” and “if they find it went bad before this date and you don’t have a good excuse you’ll be fined”.

You as consumer can’t really tell if foodstuff is still good or not just by the numbers on the packaging. (If you could I’ve had died long ago in food poisoning.)

I mean I can see how lack of knowledge about what “sell by” etc. numbers mean can lead to wasting food (and how it’s in the companies best interest to keep it that way).

But the “it’s expired” = “bad” thinking needs to die.

Would make things easier. 😀

Doesn’t the produce sit frozen in a warehouse for a year sometimes before it goes out to the grocery store? Yuck.

No wonder there’s such a giant difference in taste and juciness between grocery store tomatoes and the tomatoes that we have in the garden for sadly, only a couple of months out of the year.

My general assumption has been that the date printed on the packaging amounts to “when the warranty expires”. It should be good until then. After that, all bets are off. I don’t throw it away if there’s some left then — only if there’s mold or something. But I assume that if any is left after that date it may go moldy, so if I get four days’ worth, say, with only three days left on it, then a quarter of it is at risk of going to waste. Statistically, that will add up to paying extra for the food I do eat, in the long run, even if it actually goes moldy the day after the timer runs out only one time in three or something.

As for freezing it, as a rule I don’t want soggy bread and I don’t want to make the preparation time for things like sandwiches jump by 1800% or so by adding “thaw for 20 minutes” to the start of a procedure that otherwise takes only around a minute and a half. Especially not when I know darn well that our civilization and supply lines and technology can supply me with fresher bread, because it used to, and simply chooses not to. Responding to that by spending extra time, extra money, or accepting reduced quality (let alone more than one of those three) feels like knuckling under to a coercive bully … even if a nebulous and hard-to-identify coercive bully. And what happens when people knuckle under is, the bully learns he can get away with it, and not only cements the new regime of crappier behavior, but becomes willing to push it another step, and next year maybe it becomes impossible to find bread with even a week left of guaranteed freshness, and a year after that, with more than five days, and a year after that …

So, instead, I pretty much only buy stuff with adequate time still on it. If stuff with only a day or two won’t sell, the stores will pressure the manufacturers for fresher product. The bully will discover that his new regime of crappier behavior is getting pushback and may back off.

I don’t know much (well, anything) about contemporary food standards law; but the old stuff is quite interesting. Food standard laws were some of the first regulatory offences and date back to the Middle Ages. The penalties for selling spoiled, or underweight, food items were very draconian.

I’m sure we’ve discussed before the origin of “baker’s dozen” being thirteen. Bakers would add an extra loaf to an order, rather than risk the batch being underweight.

I’m a weirdo freak who does not mind soggy bread at all. One of my favorite fast meals is a cheese sandwich melted in the microwave. The grease from the cheese kind of melds into76y h6666666666666666 the bread sog.

I left the weird string of numbers in there because I thought everyone might want to view my cat’s contribution to this conversation.

Missed the edit window, but had one more thing.

No wonder there’s such a giant difference in taste and juciness between grocery store tomatoes and the tomatoes that we have in the garden for sadly, only a couple of months out of the year.

This is more due to a) the variety of tomato they grow for selling at the store and b) picking it early so it won’t get bruised in transport. For point a), they cultivated the plants that best survived being picked by machine rather than by hand.

Speaking of food, today’s Graun has an article on a fad diet: They mock vegans and eat 4lbs of steak a day: meet ‘carnivore dieters’

My favourite bit is about the “bitcoin carnivores”: I didn’t know that that was a thing, but as soon as I read it, it seemed inevitable.

“Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat [government-backed] money, and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food,” said Michael Goldstein, a “bitcoin and meat maximalist” base in Austin, Texas. “Once someone has grown capable of seeing beyond the lies and myths that experts peddle in one domain, it becomes easier to see beyond them in other domains as well.”

There’s a link to a Motherboard article: Inside the World of the ‘Bitcoin Carnivores’, which is hilarious.

The implication of “fiat” is that modern money and modern foods are both artificial, and Bitcoin carnivorism supposedly solves this problem. Goldstein has been a dedicated carnivore since 2015, he told me, and eats “only from the animal kingdom, and mostly fat.” When I asked him to spell out the apparent Bitcoin-carnivory-libertarianism trifecta at play, Goldstein responded, “Once you put on the They Live glasses, you can’t take them off,” referring to the 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that when worn reveal the world is controlled by evil aliens.

(I reached out to a couple of well-known nutritionists for this article. One responded in an email, saying that the diet is “too ridiculous to be covered.” Another wrote, “Yet another extreme diet. Sigh.”)

Sadly, nobody quoted in either article says “avoiding vegetables to own the libs”.