The $18 gallon of milk and the $5 can of Pepsi

Nunavut, the relatively new province in Canada carved out of the Northwest Territories, is enduring high food prices.

Not just ordinary high food prices.  Food prices bordering on outright gouging.

Would you pay $104 (Canadian) for a case of bottled water?  Here, it's about $9-10, and the store-brand is about $6.

How about $10 for a bell pepper, where it's about $2 here?  A two-liter bottle of Pepsi for $19.  Store-brand chicken - here, you could get it for about $6 a pound.  In Nunavut, it's $65 for a 2kg package, or roughly $14.75 a pound.

Part of the reason why prices are so high is understandable - Nunavut has no roads, it is remote place, and fuel and shipping factor into the price.  But with Nunavut's minimum wage at $11 an hour, you can bet stores are exploiting the disadvantages of not having access to more stores.  If they are the only game in town, you can bet they're going to charge whatever they like and make a profit off of it.

Furthermore, Nunavutians could go to a major city, purchase what they need at a fraction of the price, and then ship it home.  However, shipping costs would easily negate this convenience - if shipping to Nunavut is $10 per kilogram and you're shipping 100 kilograms of food that cost you $500, that's $1,000 added to the price, easily double the cost you've purchased and increasing the per-kilogram cost to $15.

However, if you're a person with a narcissistic political bent, the cogs are turning in your head - just like cigarettes, you'd demand for a tax so high that few people buy the product you don't like.  Instead of an outright ban on bottled water, a town with a snobbish environmental bent (and a few bitter cranks) could charge $100 for a case.  In New York, where Mike Bloomberg is trying to limit soda sizes to sixteen ounces, he could instead charge $0.125 per ounce in taxes, tacking on $1 for every 8 ounces of soda consumed (64 ounces would command $8)  Or how about a two cent per calorie tax on fattening foods?  No one would want to buy a 2850 calorie milkshake if they're paying $57 in pure tax on it - or that 6,000 calorie Vermonster sporting a $120 tax!

Free - to eat a Quarter Pounder with cheese

I love this great opinion piece by Kerry J. Byrne, a food and drink writer of the Boston Herald.

The government is not going to get a nation of anorexics, vegans, or perfectly proportioned people any time soon - because the very first attempt to regulate eating will make the American Revolution look like a shoving match.  No nation but in America can someone select what they want to eat, how much they want to eat, and at what price point they want to pay for what they eat.  We don't follow the anorexic or

I like going to b. good, which is burger joint that sells much healthier burgers and so forth.  A full meal with fries and a shake costs about $12 - and often I can afford it.  However, I also like to go to Burger King for a bacon double cheeseburger for half of that cost.  I can either have a yogurt parfait at Au Bon Pain, a yogurt shake at b. good, or ice cream at Ben & Jerry's (or a local joint).

Now, if you have $3 and you can feed yourself pretty well on that, you're lucky.  It might be true that we have healthy food deserts (but you also notice there are plenty of lottery and liquor oases), but if there is food and it sates us until the next meal, then someone's telling a big fat lie.  Moreover, if you can buy that meal off the dollar menu at Wendy's and work all 800 calories off in a day, bless you.  No one's forcing a gun to your head to do jumping jacks and mountain climbers - just move around and keep active.

How about this neat idea from a mother with three children - you can still have junk food, but you gotta work for it.  If there's a McDonald's three miles away, the Happy Meal is yours if want to walk for it.  Or if you want to go to Sonic, we take the dog too and give it a run.  I think that's a marvelous idea - work for your junk food, make it slightly more difficult to access (no knee-jerk food fascism such as bake sale bans and getting into a lathering snit over 2800 calories shakes - unless you've had major dental work and can't eat solid foods), and get some exercise in the bargain - it'll make you at least hungrier for it!

Byrne is certainly right about one thing - we aren't active enough.  I'm not and I'm free to admit it - I work 8-9 hours a day at a desk, and the last thought on my mind on the way to work or on the way home on the bus is exercise.  I could get a bicycle, but I like to ride with my huge noggin al fresco - no helmet.  When we aren't active, even if we're on a strict macrobiotic hypervegan diet, we gain weight.  The worst thing we can do is nag people to death to lose the weight, but given an appropriate, non-obnoxious incentive to do so, and people will flock to it.

Take out the fear of getting injured or being a victim to violent and non-violent crimes, and all those poor people who are overweight will be healthier.  It'll certainly knock down the Potemkin food deserts and the fun out of marching lockstep in the streets, extolling the virtues of Puritanism gone amok.

Chef Chang's House to close and become Sichuan Gourmet

According to Universal Hub via the Boston Restaurant Talk blog, Chef Chang's House, the unassuming Chinese restaurant about 25 feet from the Brookline/Boston line (and right next to the mid-60s/early 70s white Beacon Street sign) will close and become Sichuan Gourmet.  Two branches of Sichuan House are already in Billerica and Framingham.

I discovered the restaurant in 1992, while coming home for weekends at UMass Dartmouth.  Somehow I was hungry and I wanted something quick, and right at the portal of the "C" line trolley was this restaurant.  It's very low-key, comfortable, and out-of-the-way.  Sweet and sour chicken for lunch back then was $4.25...not a bad deal for a poor college student!

The lunch specials came with soup (never got the soup) and an appetizer (either wontons or an egg roll).  The duck sauce served with the egg rolls had a very slight hint of strawberries, although I can't confirm this.  And each diner got a free pot of hot tea plus refills of ice water.

The sweet and sour chicken at Chef Chang's House is the yardstick to compare restaurant sweet and sour chicken made at Chinese restaurants.  Usually, the other versions are a day-glo mess of chicken fingers, a heavily-sugary (and often piping hot because of the sugar) sauce, and maybe a cherry or a pineapple here or there (Liane's in Hyde Park used to have cherries and pineapple, but don't anymore).  Chef Chang's sauce is exactly the right balance of sweet and sour, and they toss in pickles, carrots, green peppers and onions.  And, at the very end of the meal, I save the cherry for last, as that represents the end of a good meal.

In 2010, the lunch special has increased to $6.95, still very reasonable for the college student, and for an extra dollar I get the healthier and stickier brown rice.  However, It's sad that a good Chinese restaurant like this must close.  King's House in Hyde Park did the same and they were open for over 32 years until he closed in 2007.  Kenny King did a great business competing against Liane's...his food was much more expensive but well worth it.  He closed because people liked Liane's better and they usually deal in high volume (the luncheon/dinner specials are enough to feed two or have over two meals!)  Talk and Wok (where the Mug and Muffin used to be eons ago) isn't as good and imparts that thin, cheesy Chinese restaurant patina.  Maybe Sichuan Gourmet will prove to be as good, but I will certainly miss Chef Chang's House.

(Aside: the best homemade sweet and sour chicken I had was at an old high school friend's house.  Maybe the new owners of Sichuan Gourmet could get lessons from her?)

I'll take the calorie counts, easy on the nanny statism, please

I know I'm fat. Not pleasingly plump, not extra padding, just plain, ugly, disgusting fat. The battle of the bulge has been going on for nigh on eighteen years, ever since I left working at a shoe store and found myself at a love affair with a computer and sedentary living. My doctor and I still can't understand why my blood sugar and cholesterol are so outstanding, but the dirty zone is the old gullet. Once in awhile, I hear hushed English voices trying to determine if I'm the second pregnant man in the world (or the first authentic pregnant man), but rest assured, you will all be the first to know if that gut was either a ectotopic newborn or just my huge stomach. I'm definitely not proud of it.

However, parents have been sort of looking the other way. They're too busy holding two jobs, watching their 401(k) dwindle to nothing, and basically surviving on the smell of an oily rag. A trip to McDonalds is Tavern on the Green, so why not fill their cherubs with stuff that will keep them happy while they try to beat the debt collector?

The things I've noticed in my gustational journeys are many. The more I think about it, though, I eat because (a) I'm hungry, (b) I'm bored, (c) things ain't going well in Cleary Squared land, (d) it's there.

What I've noticed in my eating habits is as follows.

- A few months ago, I went to Cambridgeside to grab some dinner. (I've been learning to eat at 5:00 because if I eat later, I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, leaching off that meatloaf or cheeseburger pie.) Taco Bell is one of the best places to get Mexican food, even though Qdoba and Chipotle make theirs much fresher. I couldn't get near the place, or even the register. Couldn't have been the 79, 89 or 99 cent taco/burrito specials, couldn't it? Cheap food = popular food, and no wonder - BK's value meals were clocking in at $7 minimum! And places like Sakkio (great chicken teriyaki) were also busy as beavers as they had $4.99 chicken teryiaki with maki rolls! The other specialty shops, however, were bare. The Indian shop hardly had a person there, as well as the Thai place and the mini-bistrots.

I think what bothers the health scolds is that when people don't have a lot of money, they're going to see what they can get for as little as possible - both monetarily and nutritionally. They can't swing over to Souper Salad or visit the local vegetarian place and hope that $5 will fill their tummies, when a single bowl of mugilltawany soup is $4.99 before taxes. If these health scolds want to introduce healthier foods to the public, bring down the exorbitant prices of healthy foods! Is it too much to say, "to hell with the bottom line and profits...let's make healthy food cheap!" This includes all of the trendy food items like organics and fair trade items - which are marked up considerably over plain Jane foods. I don't care if my blue corn chips came from an labor faction in Ecuador - all I want is affordable (and delicious!) food.

- I don't like Weight Watchers. Period. Most of the leaders are very nice, and have lost anywhere between 60 and 100 pounds. Weigh-ins I liked, because it was in front of the nice leader instead of my doctor, who keeps on (sarcastically) suggesting stomach surgery. The points system is pretty neat and scientific. The culture of meetings every single second, however, are the deal breaker. Weight Watchers is food's version of AA-I'm overweight, not injecting myself with 98% pure heroin and selling my kids to feed my habit. If my weakness is food, wouldn't a more rounded program of (a) one-on-one with a qualified nutritionist, (b) one-on-one with a qualified trainer, and (c) one-on-one with a qualified psychologist to dig deep down and figure out why I'm gaining all this weight? Forget all the fad crap, like Hydroxywhizbang and Dr. Lala's Cabbage and Lemongrass 30-day fast. I'd like to lose the weight and keep my sanity, thanks.

- Health eugenics - raising a more perfect human race through nutrition - is a dangerous thing. Self-righteousness is even more so, as the assumption that Your Way should be Everyone's Way is not merely arrogant, it's dead wrong. For every vegan (militant, obnoxious, or just a fussy pain in the ass) who throws a fit every time someone dares to bring in a hamburger, there is a long-time practicing vegetarian who can whip up a 100% vegetarian meal that looks like the real meat-laden McCoy and no one ever suspects a thing, and will not be bothered in the least if you drink skim milk in their presence. The way to introduce healthy eating and avoiding obesity is not to jam it down people's throats - although that hasn't stopped politicians from hiking cigarette taxes through the wazoo while redistributing that money through everything else but health. Sure, I don't mind calorie counts on the menus, and I hardly notice the missing trans fats. (It's a nice test in math to see if you can make a filling meal for under 500 calories.) When the busybodies (pardon me, the "concerned") delve into the holy nonsense of taxing sodas and pulling out vending machines because Heaven forfend there's a molecule of trans fat in it, that's when people get turned off into getting healthy, and do their best to sneak around it. Hey, prohibition really worked for Al Capone, didn't it?

The only person, believe it or not, who gets the health thing right is Richard Simmons. Kids are so overprotected and hovered over these days is that they don't get to run around and get the pent-up energy out of their systems - yet when these same kids get fat, the administrators and teachers panic and overcompensate. The best solution for this is bringing back physical education, something I give huge support to (even though back at Latin Academy, we had a huge floor that passed for "gym".) You get kids who get exercise and maintain a healthy life, and teachers get more attentive kids. Not a bad deal.

Food control - why it's a waste of time and a failure

Every time I enter the L'il Peach in Cleary Square, the kids from the Rogers and Hyde Park High load up on whatever sugar-laden or fat-laden treats they can get their hands on. Many a time, I joked out loud that there should be a snack tax - one that would discourage kids from bollixing up the line by forking over more money for Pixy Stix, Chef's Cajun/Ketchup/Soul chips, and Ring Pops.

That would give richer, tonier, wealthier towns a wicked idea, though. Tack on a quarter to a fist full of Tootsie Pops, a bag of chips, or anything else that looks like junk food. They take a harsher line: they ban any form of sugar in their schools.

I'm wondering if the dearth of cupcakes and crullers really raised the SAT scores - no wealthy family will have their spawn at UMass Amherst to flip burgers or work in a cubicle when they could be at a Big Six accounting firm with a hot trophy wife and five Stepford children.

I think these richer towns have it wrong: You cannot hope to rein in obesity if you have a group of resentful kids and equally resentful parents glaring at you as if you were Captain Queeg. Take away the sugar, and they're bound to find it elsewhere and consume it sub rosa.

Are the kids from Lynn going to become illicit sugar suppliers for the kids in Lynnfield? How about the North Andover kids, jonesing for a can of Coke Classic, surreptitiously going over the border to Lawrence to snag a can - at inflated prices? And Brookline is surrounded by Boston, and it's easy to sneak into Allston and Roxbury to get your fix of Ho-hos and Yoo Hoo.

If these richer towns really want to do something about obesity, the first thing is to take the advice of Richard Simmons - bring back gym, also known as physical education. Letting the kids run around for twelve minutes a day during recess will not only get all that pent-up energy out of their systems, it will help maintain their health without your school administration being branded a nanny-state killjoy. The MCAS and other boutique courses can wait - and you won't be taking away a single cupcake or cookie without a whimper, as they'll be burned off as soon as the recess bell rings.

Second, the teachers should be examples to students, and not live their lives through them. That means they should encourage healthier eating by eating healthier themselves. If the teachers can have donuts and flavored coffee during their meetings and are telling their kids they can't bring in cupcakes for the bake sale, then the teacher's a hypocrite AND a liar. Maybe after a few meetings with the things they're forcing their students to do, they will modify their hasty decision.

Third, and most importantly, it is most important to know that social engineering through food control is a bad idea. Making kids perfect at the expense of letting them be kids is a Sysiphian task. Trying to control children through food also brings up nastier, elitist overtones, as in "Johnny won't be much if he's 300 pounds vs. Jenny's a good girl for being within 99% of her weight and height profile." In the future, Johnny could lose all that weight, or even maintain the weight and be fit (normal blood pressure, good cholesterol scores, etc.), while Jenny is in the hospital yet again because she can't gain control of her anorexia or buliemia, and she's one or two binge-purge sessions away from choking on her own vomit and dying - and she's the same 72 pounds she was in 5th grade, at the age of 21.

I don't talk about these things lightly because I am overweight myself. I am over 300 pounds, although I am 6-4. I have high blood pressure at times, and I am prone to lose weight one doctor's visit, only to put it back on another. I sit in front of a computer all day, and exercise is hit-or-miss. Ice cream is my Kryptonite. So what business would I have telling the school boards that their plans to ban sugar and junk food stinks?

Plenty.

I'm a lot like Johnny: my blood sugar and cholestrol is still good. I don't eat eggs all the time, I don't drink or smoke, or do drugs. I do walk, but not enough to get benefits. My doctor tells me I won't live past 60 if I keep on doing what I do, but losing weight and keeping it off isn't an easy process. There is no magic pill, no exercise program or diet program that will make me 100+ pounds lighter tomorrow. I've tried Weight Watchers and I've found it too heavy on meetings and group therapy (and massive amounts of accounting) and not enough on proper eating.

If these school boards think that sugar and junk food are the obstacles from keeping kids healthy, maybe they should consult reputable dietiticians and physicians who aren't paid to spout out the directives these school boards want to hear, as kids will also overeat the healthy, organic stuff equally simply because they think it's OK to gorge on soy shakes and organic tofu dogs.

Maybe they can bring Richard Simmons to their schools and tell them how to do it right.

Note to self: latkes, blintzes and potato knish at the Carnegie Deli

Hanukkah is this week and the only time I had latkes was in college; in fact, the first Sunday in September when we moved the freshmen into the dorms. Those latkes were great, although they didn't offer us sour cream and applesauce.

Margalit from What Was I Thinking? is celebrating Hanukkah with those delectable latkes...so that reminds me...the next time I head down to Carnegie Deli in New York, I would imagine those latkes will probably be triple, even quadruple, the size of regular latkes. The blintzes could be the size of giant burritos, and I almost always get the huge potato knishes that are a mountain of mashed potatoes with lots of spices, wrapped around in a doughy crust a la Beef Wellington...

Hands off my Egg Foo Young and my Sweet and Sour Chicken!

Anytime we read press releases from CSPI Food Police, it's always the same: attempt to forbid people from eating certain things by hyping how bad it is (fat grams, calories, etc.). People read the article, and do either one of two things.

1. They go out and purchase the things anyway, and enjoy it, Food Police be damned!
2. They research the CSPI's findings, and then actually listen to these self-righteous scaremongers who probably hide those "forbidden" things in their refrigerators.

The Americanized version of Chinese food (there is a difference; more detail in a moment) - the oily, grease-dripping, lotus-flour covered gems of glory - is what has the CSPI Food Police in an finger-wagging frenzy.

We'll agree with them that the stuff that's served in your local restaurant is nowhere near the "real deal" Chinese cuisine you get in Chinatowns across the nation. You won't get exotic noodle soups, dim sum, or any of the stuff Chinese locals consider staples unless you take the trip down to Chinatown and spend an extra couple of bucks for top-shelf stuff. On the other hand, damning all of the local Chinese restaurants for not offering healthier (for CSPI, it would likely be twigs, tofu and anything not involving any form of meat) dishes is not just simplistic, it's elitist and racist.

If you look really, really hard enough for better items, or ask your local Chinese food restaurant, not only will they gladly cook your food to order (it might take longer or it might taste different to other palates), they'll toss in a couple of recipes and direct you to dishes that are exotic, yet affordable, and can be done much more cheaply than ordering it from their place. What's scarier than the fat grams a certain Chinese dish might contain? The relative ease activists like CSPI can scare people, and give them fear and loathing in treats like food.