Stuff We Should Eat

Being a physician, now retired, in a specialty that inherits people whose primary doctors could not get them to goal, I acquired both a fondness and respect for what prescription writing could do.  And while these medicines extend life, people too often could have avoided some of the diabetic and cardiac problems that they ask their doctors to reverse by eating more selectively.  Along with the prescriptions goes some dietary guidance.  Unfortunately, diets don't do very well once a chronic illness has been declared, though can delay onset of many conditions that have not yet appeared.  Moreover, people do pretty well taking what is prescribed, particularly when a visit to a specialist hints at serious.  But what we eat, in a world where UPC codes offer millions of products, have inputs far stronger than their doctors'.  We have preferences established long before we made our own food choices.  And food supply in America is really one of those Modern Marvels, employing farmers, chemists who make sure that their company's version has just the right sweetness, merchant marines, and those clever people who have to design the supermarket circular each week based on deals the chain market's purchasing agents are able to secure.

Each Thursday, a small collection of grocery circulars arrives in the mail.  I extract the one from my preferred megamart, the one with a Kosher meat section and nearly all products that could be Kosher containing a certification mark.  Then by the following Monday, I have poured over each column of each page, with a note pad and pen to my right.  On the front of the pad, I write down what I must get, either because I know my current supply needs replenishing, or because the ad has something that I will use during the coming week.  On the reverse side of the pad's page, a much longer list is generated.  It contains items so alluring that I must consider them irrespective of need.  Perhaps a discount on something I will eventually use.  Perhaps I can use that discount as a starter to make something a little different than originally planned.  Then on Sunday, I load the digital coupons and cut with scissors those usually very significant price reduction coupons that prove to the grocery's big honchos that you really read the flyer they paid through the nose to have the USPS deliver to every household.

Enticing people to shop there instead of someplace else as gotten ever more sophisticated.  So it came as a bit of a surprise last week when the marketers threw me and everyone else a bit of a curveball.  Instead of the big price reductions assigned to stuff that people gravitate to, those processed foods that people overeat, then try to hide from their medical provider at the next visit, this week's ad contained all those things on the medical preferred eat list.  Produce of all types:  apples, pears, cantaloupe, mushrooms, Roma tomatoes, baby carrots.  Frozen vegetables, the perfect kind for small households like mine.  Several species of fish, now flash frozen at the time of harvest, either from a farm or at sea.  Yogurts.  Some meat substitutes.  Bottled water and seltzer.  More importantly, the snack foods, soda, sugar, flour, even coffee, frozen pizza, those items on the maybe consider avoiding this list were all selling at full price, maybe even significant inflation related increases.  And since we have UPC codes, some analyst in a remote location will know quite soon whether people can be prodded to eat in a healthier way by nudges from weekly supermarket advertising.

Or maybe our candidates from office will hear about this differently.  The stuff they really want, those cookies, chips, frozen pizzas now all cost too much.  And they want the medical care needed to mitigate damage to cost less too.

But for me, I now have a little more fresh produce on my menu than I might have otherwise had, while those temptations for gluttonous after supper goodies that may as well be served in a feed bag, designed by expert processors who know our desire for these has no limits, have at least a week's deferral from my cart.