Products -- Something like Grudges Products -- Something like GrudgesPeanuts have some nutritional value. I like peanuts even
though
they give me hiccups. I like peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches. Or at least jam. Jelly has too much sugar and
no texture. But many years ago I read the label on peanut
butter. What most stores sell as peanut butter has little
semblance to peanuts and no nutritional value -- maybe a little enriched vitamins added.
Look at the label of JIF, Skippy, or Peter Pan. They contain
vegetable oil. Now I have nothing against vegetable oil either
but
here is what these companies do. They extract all of the
nutritious peanut
oil and sell it separately -- you have seen the amber bottles.
After the peanut oil extraction all that is left is a
powder/slush. To this shush they add vegetable oil. By
replacing the good peanut oil with cheap
vegetable oil, they produce a homogenous goop that is easy to spread,
does not separate, and has the nutritional value of a salted ice
cube. Oh. They may add some artificial nutrients back in to
look good on the label. They certainly add salt to placate the
American (worldwide) salt addiction.
So, if spreading your bread with peanut goop without tearing the
bread or without stirring the jar is more important that nutrition, buy
the Jif, Skippy, or Peter Pan.
If you want or you want your
children to maintain some semblance of a healthy diet, buy the Laura
Scudder's or some other peanut butter that lists its ingredients:
peanuts. Maybe a little salt, but nothing else. If
the list
of ingredients contains more than two items, it is not peanut butter
-- it is peanut goop. If it has more than a little sodium, they
are more interested in giving you heart problems than giving you peanut
butter.
In the last 10 years I have bought two of these. One at Costco
and the other at Sam's Club. This week I saw one like the Sam's
Club bag in a slightly smaller version at Wal-Mart. Take it from
me: Do not waste your money on one of the First Aid Kits. I do not mean the cigar box things. Those you know are a waste. No. These are the bulging red
and black fabric zipper cases. If you open one up you will see a
large quantity of little, tiny packages of all sorts of things.
These are organized neatly into pages with one side items and the other
side a paperboard sheet of instructions.
After buying my latest First Aid Kit a few years ago and having
needed emergency supplies from that one that it did not contain, I knew
that I needed to augment the second one when I bought it. I spent
an equal amount of money or more on supplies and stuffed them into the
bulging pack.
For normal household usage I never used the pack. After all,
it is supposed to be for emergencies. But things get old and I
decided that it was time to use up some of my investment. The
results were really depressing.
First aid is a tiny envelope with two aspirins? Another just
like it of Ibuprofen. Etc. Lots of tiny little packages none of
which would stop the bleeding of a mosquito bite.
My dog had surgery. The dog's body shape is not the same as
mine. He has a large incision on his chest. He needed
anti-biotic cream, cortisone cream, gauze pads,surgical pads, elastic bands and other things. None of these in the First Aid kit if existent were acceptable.
In an emergency you want to be able to open the pack and find what
you need rapidly. Maybe if you are 20 years old or so, you can
read the tiny print on the tiny packages. With my glasses on I
cannot. Why not? The print on each little package contains their
liability release caveat and some sort of instructions for use.
Second off, the tiny packages might have resolved the mosquito bite
issue but not anything resembling a need for real first aid. I
would have needed all of the creams, appropriate or not for one
application on my dog's wound.
I quickly went through the gauze pads, cortisone cream, anti-biotic
cream, and elastic bands that I had originally bought to augment the
kit. Then I spent the next half hour trying to fit the tiny
packages back into some reasonable organization in the pages.
I needed to replenish my supplies the next trip into town. Here are a few suggestions for you First Aid Kit companies:
I think that the tiny supplies will assist for nothing for which the
kit is intended -- or at least for which the buyer needs. If I am
going to invest the space of this large red and black bag, I need to
know that .the investment will pay off in the emergency. In this
case, I have seen no generic first aid kit in any local store that is
worth the space that it takes up.
I note that neither bag contains a brand name either on the outside
of the bag or on any of the products. At least the little useless
batteries included on Japanese electronic items have labels with
names. No name that you ever heard of but a name. These
first aid kits have no names: I would be ashamed to put my name of one
of these bags too. They have nothing that you need in an
emergency unless you consider a headache, a toothache, or a mosquito
bite an emergency.
There exist web sites with lists of items for emergencies.
Find one of these sites and buy the items, put them in a ZipLock back,
well marked, and rotate the items as you need them rather than waiting
for the emergency. This makes you familiar with what you have and
what you need as well as making sure that when you need the products
they have not expired. And when you buy new items, check out the
new technologies.