Do you ever buy dried fruit?  I assume that you've eaten Peeled Snacks, but Peeled Snacks are different.  They're, you know, BETTER.  But have you ever had just plain old Dried Fruit?  The kind that they sell at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods or your local bus depot?  The kind with raisins and cranberries and apicots, and maybe some M&Ms thrown in for good measure?  Then you've eaten OIL!

I don't get this- most dried fruit, especially the generic varieties (Whole Foods' 360 and Trader Joes brands being chief perpetrators) gets sold to you coated in oil- canola oil or safflower oil, some kind of vegetable oil.  When you buy a candy bar, okay, you expect to get some oil in it.  When you buy a Greek salad, okay, there's be some olive oil in there.  But dried fruit?  Oil? Huh?

I don't get it- who ever expected food manufacturers to coat raw ingredients in oil?  This is NOT based on demand- your average dried fruit purchaser does no chew on a prune and think to him or herself, "you know what this needs?  More COTTONseed oil!".  No, they just don't think of it at all, because if they did, they'd have to think to themself, "oh gross, oil, where's an appropriate place to vomit?"

I can give you some "industry" reasons for the oil- it lengthens the product's shelf-life, it makes it easier to pack in a plastic bag, it gives it a shiny sheen, and the penultimate reason, that homosapiens think fat tastes GOOD.  But 2 seconds of thought about this "fat fruit" thing and, whoosh, all advantages fly out the window like so much regurgitated apricot....

I should mention that Peeled Snacks doesn't add oil to its fruit, but that's not a shameless plug.  It's just common sense- you don't add ketchup to breakfast cereal because it makes it easier to eat, and you don't add salt to tea because it makes it boil faster.  You don't add oil to fruit because, well.....

....because that's really disgusting....

Yours, disgusted,

Peeled Skinny 

Posted by iankusc at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

....But they will, SOON!

 The housing "crisis" demonstrates the flexibility of the American economic engine and its willingness to milk a trend till its dry as a bone.  But to me, the housing bubble demonstrates a disturbing trend in American culture.  For the sake of argument, let's start with a couple of postulates....

1: The Housing industry requires home-owners to regularly inject money into their homes

2: For home-owners to inject money into their homes, the home-owners need jobs

3: Home-owners in America live on fixed, finite incomes

4: Whatever home-owners are spending on their homes, they are NOT spending elsewhere....

Argue any one of these statements on your own- I accept them as truisms, and have never heard any arguments that convince me otherwise.  These 4 postulates tell me that, no matter how hot the market, no matter how hyped the housing development, no matter how fast the turn-over of housing in America, the Housing market is only as solvent as the rest of the economy....

....Which right now is crap, THANKS to the housing market.  I believe that the Housing bubble stems from the dissolving of the Dot-Com bubble, whose demise drove investors flock to whatever other market seemed hot, which at the time was housing.  I'm not convinced of that origin, but doubtless, starting in about 1999 housing prices started rising at STUPID rates, and you can hardly blame investors for wanting to jump on-board.

I don't give a hoot about high-risk loans to shady borrowers or unethical practices on the parts of shifty banks.  I don't care about grift-life business models making margins off of trading mortgages, a couldn't give a rat's hienie about artificial hype for developer's faulty housing schemes, all of which have made a lot of headlines lately.  People keep looking for scapegoats, and all these goofy practices on the various players' parts make easy targets.

Forget all that.  To me, all that matters is that, in America, everyone needs housing, and whatever people spend on housing, they DON'T SPEND ELSEWHERE.  If we make a market where people spend 35%, 40%, 50% of their incomes on their homes (more than that here in New York City), that means that they AREN'T spending on their businesses, on their savings, on buying American made goods (or, as is more often the case, Chinese made goods), on education....

That means that they aren't spending enough on food!

Unless productivity is way up in America, there cannot be a booming housing market.  That's that.  Try to make a counter argument, I dare you.  I would take it a step further and say that, if productivity is up, and people spend more on their homes, then you get inflation, but that's a different, longer argument. 

I've heard arguments of positives outcomes from the housing bubble, like the rejuvenation of old housing stock (which is good), and the accumulated value of middle-income families' homes (which is a dangerous assumption).  But these, to me, are micro-climates, and rooted in the foolish assumption that people can just pump money into their houses forever.

If we have no manufacturing economy, if as a culture we don't MAKE anything, then we are not entitled to our housing bubble.  This is not me speaking from hind-sight.  I figured this one out back in 2001.  Ticks me off, because SINCE then I became an American manufacturer, and now fewer people can afford our tasty snacks because everybody's busy paying off their userous loans!

-a ticked off Peeled Skinny, who thinks you should spend less on housing and more on ANYTHING else....

Posted by iankusc at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Surveying the beverage landscape, I'm seeing a lot of beverage companies segue from glass containers to plastic containers, which might prompt some people out there to wonder, "Aren't they RUINING THE PLANET!"

 Everybody knows that Glass is super recyclable, right?  And therefore a more environmentally sustainable packaging than plastic?  Plastic which is running mother Earth with its fossil fuel abuse and it's icky processing, and is filling landfills, and I'm pretty sure is killing the dolphins, or at least the manatees, right?

 Boy, is being a manufacturer in this day and age hard.  How do you do the math of environmental impact right now?  Sure, plastic has its problems, but glass has terrible impact as well.  It may well be easier to recycle, but it's a LOT heavier, and therefore more costly to ship (i.e. it burns more gas getting places).  And a recyclable bottle's only recyclable if someone actually, you know, RECYCLES it...

I'm humbled by the difficulty of making good choices in a world full of lesser evils.  We use plastic bags in hopes of encouraging better eating, hopefully leading to more productive people, less health care expenses, and higher quality of life for our customers.  But it's still plastic.  Will the "end" result, calculated 1,000 or 1,000,000 years from now, add up to an over-all benefit?

This is one thing that keeps the progressive minded manufacturer awake at night.  Sigh....

Posted by iankusc at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)