Eating Better

Many years ago, and I can say that, because I'm old enough, parents and homeowners and families had pantries or larders, filled to the brim. Bad weather and uncertain transportation made it a necessity, because families couldn't always get out to the store to purchase food. So pantries were filled with things like dry rice, pasta, flour and yeast to make bread, dry beans, canned fish, and canned vegetables. Here it is, 2020, and we're in a time of crisis. A trip to the store will show you shelves that are empty. But empty of what? Aside from the obvious cleaning products and paper products, some of the biggest deficiencies are areas such as canned soups and frozen pizzas. At the age of 74, I'm old enough to remember the days when a pot of soup was one of the easiest things to whip up, from things in one's pantry. The famous Italian dish pasta e fagioli was a standard, right out of the pantry. A can of broth, dried beans, canned tomatoes, and some pasta. All househol...

Looking at news reports recently, make me wonder what year this is. The world is significantly affected buy a disease, a contagious one. Meetings all around the world are hunkered down in their homes, afraid to come out, or told not to come out. Shelves in the grocery stores can be empty. People wear masks and sometimes gloves to do everyday tasks such as grocery shopping. Most stores and businesses are shuttered. It says to me, that I'm in some sort of Time Warp. It's either centuries earlier, and we are protecting ourselves from the plague. Or, it's far into the future, with a different reality than the one I remember. Either way, this whole covid 19 experience and it's a company in pandemic are certainly a culture and time shock to everyone.

When I look back, over the last few months, I see nothing but a global screwup, of astronomical proportions.  If the world's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic isn't the quintessential example of  Murphy's Law, I don't know what is.  From the early mischaracterization of the virus as not being a global threat, to nations and local areas not having the resources, it's been a mess. To make all this worse, it's clear that no one has set a long term communications plan, to report updates.  For example, here in the NY-NJ area, we typically get three, lengthy press conference style updates every day.  Each lasts anywhere from an hour, to an hour and a half.  Much of it is meant to be gracious, thanking the almost endless list of front-line personnel, to other government agencies, to individual patients.  A truly effective, long term communications plan would do three things: Set a reasonable, bite-size time limit, for each daily presser. Set standard ...