Air Tight Sanitary Package.
Editors Note: It been said by one of my readers that I should rename this blog “Jack’s Weekly Rant” rather than its current title. Now it would appear that this would be a more appropriate title for my blog, as I have not posted anything for a week. That said, I have a very valid excuse. I’ve been working on my taxes, which is a daunting task, as my tax guy thinks I paid way too much taxes in 2006 – the only year I used Turbo Tax to pay my taxes. Take my advice, don’t use it. Now on to our regularly scheduled programming.
From Meredith Wilson’s “Music Man”:
“Who's gonna patronize a little bitty two by four kinda store anymore?Whaddaya talk, whaddaya talk.Where do you get it?Gone, goneGone with the hogshead cask and demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickel barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub andthe pail and the fierce”
When I a kid we went to Knott’s Berry Farm, before Disneyland opened, it was a kind-of tourist attraction then with a couple of lame rides.
Back in 1935 Walter Knott perfected a way to grow boysenberries, a cross breed of a raspberry and a blackberry cultivated by a Mr. Rudolf Boysen. Walter set up a roadside stand on State Route 39 – then the only road between Los Angeles and Riverside to sell the berries, and as it turned out it people liked them a lot. His family restaurant and boysenberry pie business began to blossom and by 1940 there was always a huge line of people wanting to have some of his wife’s fried chicken followed by a nice slice of that tasty pie. To entertain his waiting guests, Walter assembled a western Ghost Town using real old western buildings moved from various sites to his Buena Park farm. The rest is history.
There was a general store there that was a recreation of what it would have looked like back in the 1880’s and I remember that there were pickle barrels, cracker barrels, large wheels of cheese and lots stuff hanging off the walls and can goods from that age. Even had a wooden Indian holding a bunch of cigars at the door.
Back in the eighteen-hundreds when you went to the general store a lot of stuff was served right out of the barrel. If you wanted a pickle you lifted the lid and fished one out. Needed some crackers, you grabbed a handful and put them in the woven basket that you brought with you. Other than canned goods, pretty much everything was sold out of the crates or barrels they came in.
No body seemed to mind if the peanut butter had turned a little stale, or that the pickles were a little ripe, or that you got a stomach ache once in a while from eating the stuff. It was just the way things were.
But this slowly began to change when in 1898 the National Biscuit Company merged with 114 bakeries across the country and came up with a way to package soda crackers in wax paper to “seal in the freshness”. No more need to buy those stale soda crackers out of the barrel at the general store anymore. Gone was the cracker barrel, and using NBC’s idea of buying up the competition and “modernizing” the way the goods were packaged and sold gave birth to the idea that you could buy individual packaged food goods.
This, followed by the discovery that there were nasty things called germs that could make you sick gave way to a whole new era of cleanliness in America. Advertising slogans such as “it comes in an air tight sanitary package”, or my favorite “never touched by human hands”, has given birth to a germ-a-phobic society that today has gone totally over the edge, if you ask my opinion.
It’s everywhere now. Fast food restaurants often have in eyes sight of their customers a special sink where their employees wash their hands with a special antibacterial soap.
Children’s toys have to be cleaned after every play date with Clorox to keep from spreading germs!
When I was young we played in the dirt, at some point I believe every child eats some. Getting exposed to germs builds up our immune system. Today everything has to be antiseptic to the point of absurdity.
You go to the super market now and they have a dispenser of anti-bacterial wipes to clean your cart with so you won’t pick up any germs from the person who used the cart before. Typhoid Mary best find a new line of work!
Now’s there is a commercial on TV that shows a woman wiping down her kitchen cabinets with a piece of raw chicken, while the announcer says “using your kitchen sponge to wipe down your countertops spreads germs…”. So what, using a piece of chicken is better? Who knew!
All life is remarkable. Amazingly it is designed to adapt and change to the world around it. When terrible plagues ravished the world, the human race became better from it as the one’s that survived developed an immunity to it. That’s how we are designed. But now we seemingly have a drug for everything that we haven’t managed to kill with a dose of antibacterial spray.
It makes you wonder; how did we manage to evolve as far as we have without living in an air tight sanitary package!
Editors Note: It been said by one of my readers that I should rename this blog “Jack’s Weekly Rant” rather than its current title. Now it would appear that this would be a more appropriate title for my blog, as I have not posted anything for a week. That said, I have a very valid excuse. I’ve been working on my taxes, which is a daunting task, as my tax guy thinks I paid way too much taxes in 2006 – the only year I used Turbo Tax to pay my taxes. Take my advice, don’t use it. Now on to our regularly scheduled programming.
From Meredith Wilson’s “Music Man”:
“Who's gonna patronize a little bitty two by four kinda store anymore?Whaddaya talk, whaddaya talk.Where do you get it?Gone, goneGone with the hogshead cask and demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickel barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub andthe pail and the fierce”
When I a kid we went to Knott’s Berry Farm, before Disneyland opened, it was a kind-of tourist attraction then with a couple of lame rides.
Back in 1935 Walter Knott perfected a way to grow boysenberries, a cross breed of a raspberry and a blackberry cultivated by a Mr. Rudolf Boysen. Walter set up a roadside stand on State Route 39 – then the only road between Los Angeles and Riverside to sell the berries, and as it turned out it people liked them a lot. His family restaurant and boysenberry pie business began to blossom and by 1940 there was always a huge line of people wanting to have some of his wife’s fried chicken followed by a nice slice of that tasty pie. To entertain his waiting guests, Walter assembled a western Ghost Town using real old western buildings moved from various sites to his Buena Park farm. The rest is history.
There was a general store there that was a recreation of what it would have looked like back in the 1880’s and I remember that there were pickle barrels, cracker barrels, large wheels of cheese and lots stuff hanging off the walls and can goods from that age. Even had a wooden Indian holding a bunch of cigars at the door.
Back in the eighteen-hundreds when you went to the general store a lot of stuff was served right out of the barrel. If you wanted a pickle you lifted the lid and fished one out. Needed some crackers, you grabbed a handful and put them in the woven basket that you brought with you. Other than canned goods, pretty much everything was sold out of the crates or barrels they came in.
No body seemed to mind if the peanut butter had turned a little stale, or that the pickles were a little ripe, or that you got a stomach ache once in a while from eating the stuff. It was just the way things were.
But this slowly began to change when in 1898 the National Biscuit Company merged with 114 bakeries across the country and came up with a way to package soda crackers in wax paper to “seal in the freshness”. No more need to buy those stale soda crackers out of the barrel at the general store anymore. Gone was the cracker barrel, and using NBC’s idea of buying up the competition and “modernizing” the way the goods were packaged and sold gave birth to the idea that you could buy individual packaged food goods.
This, followed by the discovery that there were nasty things called germs that could make you sick gave way to a whole new era of cleanliness in America. Advertising slogans such as “it comes in an air tight sanitary package”, or my favorite “never touched by human hands”, has given birth to a germ-a-phobic society that today has gone totally over the edge, if you ask my opinion.
It’s everywhere now. Fast food restaurants often have in eyes sight of their customers a special sink where their employees wash their hands with a special antibacterial soap.
Children’s toys have to be cleaned after every play date with Clorox to keep from spreading germs!
When I was young we played in the dirt, at some point I believe every child eats some. Getting exposed to germs builds up our immune system. Today everything has to be antiseptic to the point of absurdity.
You go to the super market now and they have a dispenser of anti-bacterial wipes to clean your cart with so you won’t pick up any germs from the person who used the cart before. Typhoid Mary best find a new line of work!
Now’s there is a commercial on TV that shows a woman wiping down her kitchen cabinets with a piece of raw chicken, while the announcer says “using your kitchen sponge to wipe down your countertops spreads germs…”. So what, using a piece of chicken is better? Who knew!
All life is remarkable. Amazingly it is designed to adapt and change to the world around it. When terrible plagues ravished the world, the human race became better from it as the one’s that survived developed an immunity to it. That’s how we are designed. But now we seemingly have a drug for everything that we haven’t managed to kill with a dose of antibacterial spray.
It makes you wonder; how did we manage to evolve as far as we have without living in an air tight sanitary package!
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