Vanilla Frosting Isn't Diet Food

[disneysteve]

I do think if they would help if they just disclosed upfront how many calories (at fast food places) each item is, then people would make better choices, not always, but I think a lot of them would. Trust me, if you want nutritional info when you eat out you have to do your homework.

Not just at fast food places but at ALL restaurants. Many places are trying to enact this on a local basis but it really should be the law everywhere. We have the right to know what we're eating when we order a meal in a restaurant whether it is McDonald's or a fine French establishment. You can't make healthy choices when you've got no information with which to evaluate the options.

[PrincessPerky]

So when was the last time you asked for nutritional info at a restaurant?


I worked at a fast food restaurant for 3 years and never once heard one persona ask how many calories were in anything....

The info was available though.

[creditcardfree]

I am kinda laughing at this thread every time a reply finds it's way to my emailbox.

To think I started a topic, "Vanillad Frosting Isn't Diet Food" and got 3 pages of repies, lol.

I'm kind of laughing, too. I kept seeing this pop back up. I finally decided to see what all the fuss was!!

Good discussion.

[disneysteve]

So when was the last time you asked for nutritional info at a restaurant?


I worked at a fast food restaurant for 3 years and never once heard one persona ask how many calories were in anything....

The info was available though.

I've looked at the nutritional info at some fast food places when it has been posted or in pamphlet form, and I've definitely ordered differently based on nutritional info printed on menus in certain places. Honestly, I haven't gone out of my way to seek out the info when it wasn't readily available, but I sure would like to have it in front of me when I'm deciding what to order.

[tzsgti]

Nearly 10 percent of health spending for obesity - Health care- msnbc.com

[cantretire]

Not just at fast food places but at ALL restaurants. Many places are trying to enact this on a local basis but it really should be the law everywhere. We have the right to know what we're eating when we order a meal in a restaurant whether it is McDonald's or a fine French establishment. You can't make healthy choices when you've got no information with which to evaluate the options.

We have this in NY. Every menu has the nutritional info on it. Quite depressing, actually. I don't think it will help much.

[cptacek]

DS mentioned that farmers are paid not to farm in some instances. I don't disagree that this program dictates market prices, and what crops are raised. However, if we had all farmers out there planting crops with machinery and modern farming techniques, it would not be profitable very long, and supply would bottom out as farmers lost the revenue to meet their costs. A brand new combine costs upwards of $300,000. Your small time farmer cannot support that purchase. Instead, huge company farms buy 6 or 7 of these and have a monopoly on the market, prices. Small farmers are either paid to not farm, or they survive by leasing their land to company farms. More often, it is more profitable to be paid not to farm. This also keeps supply low enough to justify the increased prices necessary to make a profit, while still meeting demand.

Without this, the small farmer would either be forced to try his hand at farming in a co-op and effectively raise supply to the extent no one would be able to turn a profit, or they would lease their land to company farms who would then not farm it in order to keep prices high enough for them to pad their pockets. The gov't instead has stepped in and generally will pay a little over the going lease price of land. It keeps the small farmer in business for himself, while keeping the price of goods in the store low enough to be affordable. As a disclaimer, I directly benefit from this program as a landowner in in a state over 600 miles away that I couldn't farm if I wanted to. I still hold a hunting lease on the property, and between the gov't and the hunting lease, my property taxes are paid for me.

I don't know how you get rid of this program without killing off the small farmer - by small I mean anything less than 10,000 acres of row crops.


This still all goes back to the idea of what should be taxed and what shouldn't, and who decides that. It's too arbitrary. For a gov't that spends millions on the San Francisco Bay field mouse, I think they would find some way to try to explain away a tax on bran muffins.

My take on the CRP program (Conservation Reserve Program), and other similar programs, is that we small farmers could compete with big farmers a lot better without it. Around here the CRP program is more like a farmer's retirement than anything else. If the old farmers needed money for retirement would sell the land, there would be more land on the market, prices would go down and we could buy something that a farm could support OR they would rent it out to someone getting started. Many of these acres in CRP are small fields and not the best ground, so the bigger farmers wouldn't want to mess with them. But people just getting started would.

For example, a farmer we are working with is a big farmer. He is not a "corporate farm" as it is just one guy, but he is the guy with the $300,000 combine, a new sprayer, etc. He has let us take over some of his smaller fields because he didn't want to have to "mess" with them, as he put it. But that doubled our acres! Of course, we have a used, well everything. A $9000 tractor, $2000 combine, $16,000 12 row planter (vs 16 rows or more), etc.

We bought some land from a cousin of my husband. Over half of it was in CRP. This worked for them because they got it from their father when he died...no expenses other than taxes. They weren't trying to produce enough off of it for buying to make economic sense. We are letting it expire next year, because we can run cows on it instead and hopefully make more money than that.

FYI...some CRP payments around here are for $55 an acre. Pasture rent is around $16 an acre and cash rent for crop ground is between $40 and $60. We don't have irrigation, so it is less than other parts of the country.

The CRP program started out as a way to get highly erodible ground out of production. This stops run off and erosion, which in some fields are necessary, although I don't know why the government should pay you to do something you should do for yourself. But, it has turned into a retirement program and a hunting program (you can also get paid to let strangers hunt on your property, which we will never do, though we have leased hunting rights to one guy as long as we can hunt it as well) and is not really helping conserve anything.

One thing...I don't understand this:

The gov't instead has stepped in and generally will pay a little over the going lease price of land. It keeps the small farmer in business for himself, while keeping the price of goods in the store low enough to be affordable.

When you put the land in CRP, you can't do anything with it except hunt on it, and hay it every third year if your county is in a disaster (I think...they change the rules all the time, it is hard to keep up) I don't see how this keeps the small farmer in business?

Also, there is little correlation between the price of the raw commodity the farmer gets (wheat, corn, etc) and the price in the grocery store. The more processed the food gets the less the correlation is. Prices went to all time highs last summer, but have now dropped (wheat was at least $12 last summer, now $5, soybeans were $16 and now $9). Food prices have not followed. I saw a booth at the state fair years ago where there is less than $.10 worth of corn in a box of corn flakes. The rest of the price is the processing, transportation and marketing.