Trusting the Food Supply Chain (or Not)

In my previous post, I defended buying pre-mixed foods, but I wanted to also present an argument against these, for the sake of completeness. The argument is that the food supply has largely become corrupted as companies cut corners, introduce harmful chemicals and pesticides, and otherwise rely on deceptive labeling to trick consumers, and this […]

Preparing Food to Scale

There’s often a financial benefit to preparing your own food in bulk, but preparing everything is a chore and doesn’t always offer the benefits you might think. I am a lazy cook, and any food that takes me more than 30 minutes to prepare has my immediate suspicion. The only exceptions to this rule are […]

Bread Machine Maintenance: Economic Thoughts on Bargains

I have finally figured out a decent custom setting for making einkorn bread in my Breadman bread machine, but while making my most recent loaf, the machine started producing an annoying squeaking sound. For awhile now, I’ve been finding some grease at the bottom of the pan, so I decided it was time to replace […]

When the Skills Pool is Dominated by Special Interests

I’m a firm believer in learning and developing skills over time, but I have to acknowledge that these don’t always work in employees’ favor. The first thing that comes to mind is how academia gleefully encourages people to pursue academic degrees even when those degrees can’t afford their own expense, but this also carries into […]

Rustic Appeal

Just today, I learned about a medieval town that hired inspectors to test the quality of the saffron being sold in their marketplace. Saffron was expensive then, and it’s still expensive now. Apparently, the spice dealers had started spiking their saffron with various other ingredients to increase profits, but some paid for this deception with […]

DIY vs Supporting Small Businesses

In 2022, I was fully expecting to move out of state in 2023, so I went to my barber for what I thought would be the last time, and left him a rather large tip to thank him for being a great barber for the past 8 years. One month passed, and it became clear […]

Wasting Your Life Learning the Wrong Things

Today, I finally fixed my network homelab so that one of my servers can host web applications using the Django framework. Mind you, my professional experience has been more along the lines of the .Net framework, and I even spent about 4 years building a fairly complex open source web application using it. As I […]

The Perfect Boiling Pot (and Other Consumer Woes)

Several months ago, when I started making major dietary changes, one of the key changes I made involved replacing the frozen cheese pitas I used to eat for breakfast with boiled eggs from pasture-raised chickens. A week or two ago, I tried those cheese pitas for the first time in over a month, and I […]

The Struggle to Find and Afford Healthy Food

I’ve spent an ungodly amount of money on groceries this past month. Without going into too much detail, I finally went to a gastroenterologist last month to talk about some of the heartburn issues I’ve had for a long time, which got much worse this past year, and when she explained to me some of […]