user: Q: Real Food Can Be Cheaper Than Junk Food

CookforGood.com has a compelling set of instructions for how to shop and cook inexpensively enough to live on food stamps. Well thought out and presented. This is a long and ongoing discussion — worthy of a cookbook, really — but here is a nice start.

The person who brought this challenge to my attention is Jill Richardson, who runs lavidalocavore.org (fast becoming my favorite) and who argues that people on food stamps may be not only short on cash but without easy transportation to adequate grocery stores.

Ms. Richardson also maintains that food stamp recipients may not have the cooking equipment and/or skill needed to get the cooking done. She proceeds to quote the often brilliant Adam Drewnowski, thusly:

“When you suggest that people buy rice, pasta, and beans, you presuppose that they have resources for capital investment for future meals, a kitchen, pots, pans, utensils, gas, electricity, a refrigerator, a home with rent paid, the time to cook. Those healthy rice and beans can take hours; another class bias is that poor people’s time is worthless.”

Part of this is true: If you don’t have a kitchen it is really hard to cook (though, modesty aside, I once lived for six months with nothing more than a hot plate and a microwave and wrote most of my columns without borrowing friends’ kitchens).

One can argue that we do need to address all these issues: transportation, housing, the urban food deserts, poverty. But meanwhile, many people could probably benefit from the idea that cooking cheaply can be done, and in much healthier fashion than buying chili dogs and donuts at the local convenience store. Assuming a kitchen, a stove, running water, etc., cooking is not that time-consuming — it can be done while performing other household chores, or for that matter by using a slow cooker, which takes almost no time at all, since it’s almost entirely unattended.

No. it’s not automatic. It’s not a true no-brainer. But it’s been done by the most varied assortment of the world’s citizens imaginable, since humans stood upright.

You don’t need a capital investment for rice and beans, any more than you do for cheeseburgers and fries. You don’t need more than ten dollars worth of cooking equipment to get started, either. And while it’s true that the ten dollars is hard to come by for some people, the point is this: You can cook less expensively than you can buy fast food, junk food, processed, packaged, and prepared food – and you can get enough sound calories to live better.

One more myth I’d like to tackle here. The idea that death and destruction lie in the “middle aisles” of supermarkets, and the “real” food is found in the periphery is outdated. In those middle aisles one can find rice, beans, sometime-decent canned foods, sometime-decent frozen vegetables, whole grains and whole grain cereals, and other real food.

A: It’s a myth that cooking has to be expensive, and time-consuming. A link that looks at how to eat well on the amount covered by food stamps shows that.


Q: Cant sleep? Step-by-step guide to shut-eye

Lower the lights. Turning off lights and lamps signals to the body that sleep time is near--the way twilight did before we had electric lighting.

The type of lightbulbs you use also matters. "Cold, harsh white light" - like that found in fluorescent bulbs - "contains a significant blue component, which is most likely to interfere with sleep onset," says Dr. Michael Terman, an expert on light and biological rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center. Blue light, more so than other colors in the light spectrum, suppresses the body's release of melatonin, the hormone that makes us sleepy.

Check lightbulb packaging for the words "soft" or "warm" and for a color temperature of 3000 kelvins or less, which is less likely to trigger insomnia, Terman says.

A: Sleepless nights are nothing new - here are tips to get some much needed rest


Q: 2004 GOP Tour Prepped Steele for Senate Run

Some of the ministers gathering at the Genesis Dreamplex Hotel in Toledo were wary of the concept of a black Republican.

Only after everyone agreed there would be no photographers, the ministers grudgingly accepted the invitation to breakfast with Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele and other members of the Empowering People of Color Tour.

As coffee was poured, a former Cosby Show actor warmed up the room. Then Steele took the microphone.

"My charge," Steele told ministers, according to news accounts, "is to take the president's positive policies, which are empowering people of color, [and bring them] out to the African American community."

It was Oct. 19, 2004, a year before Steele would be drafted by top Republicans in Washington to launch his bid for U.S. Senate. And although his lieutenant governor's office schedule gave no indication of his whereabouts, Steele was out of state, barnstorming the country for his president and party.

The national tour, organized by then-Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, teamed Steele, boxing promoter Don King and a handful of semi-celebrities and mid-level politicians to stump for Bush's reelection bid and present African Americans with a new face for the GOP.

His days on the road served as a formative experience, Steele said recently. In some ways, it became a precursor to the campaign Steele is running as he seeks a Senate seat in Maryland, a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1. In fact, King arrives today to stump for his old friend. Then, as now, Steele was honing his most powerful skill: his ability to extend a hand to Democrats, particularly black Democrats, and try to bring them around.

"What I discovered was there's an enormous opportunity for Republicans if we engage," Steele said. "If we start breaking down some of the barriers."

"We weren't bashing other candidates; we weren't bashing Democrats," said Erika Harold, Miss America 2003, an emcee on the tour. "We were just asking for the opportunity to compete for their vote."

Traveling with a state police escort, Steele crisscrossed the Midwest. From Toledo, he headed for Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, then Detroit. A few days later, he hopped a plane to Cleveland, and then Miami, Philadelphia and New York. The group made more than a dozen stops, all with the goal of persuading African Americans to leave behind decades of allegiance to Democrats.

In some towns, it was a tough sell.

A:

assistant: Some of the ministers gathering at the Genesis Dreamplex Hotel in Toledo were wary of the concept of a black Republican.