Food

OK, here we go again, it seems that the story about the government buying up large stocks of foods is growing, here is a story from WorldNetDaily:

Are feds stockpiling survival food?

‘These circumstances certainly raise red flags’

12:00 am Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A Wall Street Journal columnist has advised people to “start stockpiling food” and an ABC News Report says “there are worrying signs appearing in the United States where some … locals are beginning to hoard supplies.” Now there’s concern that the U.S. government may be competing with consumers for stocks of storable food.

“We’re told that the feds bought the entire container of canned butter when it hit the California docks. (Something’s up!),” said officials at Best Prices Storable Foods in an advisory to customers.

Spokesman Bruce Hopkins told WND he also has had trouble obtaining No. 10 cans of various products from one of the world’s larger suppliers of food stores, Oregon Freeze Dry.

He said a company official told him on the telephone when he discussed the status of his order that it was because the government had purchased massive quantities of products, leaving none for other customers.

That, however, was denied by Oregon Freeze Dry. In a website statement, the company confirmed it cannot assure supplying some items to customers.

“We regret to inform you Oregon Freeze Dry cannot satisfy all Mountain House #10 can orders and we have removed #10 cans from our website temporarily,” the company tells frustrated customers. “The reason for this is sales of #10 cans have continued to increase. OFD is allocating as much production capacity as possible to this market segment, but we must maintain capacity for our other market segments as well.”

The company statement continues, “We want to clarify inaccurate information we’ve seen on the Internet. This situation is not due to sales to the government domestically or in Iraq. We do sell products to this market, but we also sell other market segments … The reason for this decision is solely due to an unprecedented sales spike in #10 cans sales.

“We expect this situation to be necessary for several months although this isn’t a guarantee. We will update this information as soon as we know more. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience. We sincerely hope you will continue to be Mountain House customers in the future,” the company statement said.

But Hopkins wasn’t backing away from his concerns.

“The government just came in and said they’re buying it. They did pay for it,” he told WND about the summertime shipment of long-term storage butter. “They took it and no one else could have it.

“We don’t know why. The feds then went to freeze dried companies, and bought most of their canned stock,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Oregon Freeze Dry, sales manager Melanie Cornutt, told WND

Yesterday was a banner day! Got up and the day was perfect, sunny (good for the garden and solar panels!), warm but not too warm, a good breeze. Now on to the good stuff (grin!!!), I opened the package on my new clippers, I paid a little extra for this one because it had many many extra guards/guides for it, the cheaper packages had maybe 3 at the most, but this one has 10, yes, count ’em, 10, and they are color coded.

Anyhoo, I got them out, silently giggled to myself about having to find a pair of scissors to open the package, it’s amusing to have to find a cutting implement to open a package that contains a cutting implement… (guess you had to be there…), we went outside, Bob sat on an upturned milk crate, took off his shirt, had a bucket handy to catch all the hair (it will biodegrade but it takes a L O N G time), like a kid in a candy store, I picked through the colorful guards, chose the longest one (1″), and started cutting hair.

(SIDE STORY)
I used to be a hairdresser (11+ years in the biz), note the phrase “used to be”, I’ve been out of the biz at least as long as I was in, and when I quit, I QUIT doing hair. One of my “rules” I had when I did do hair was I would NOT do hair outside of the salon, I would work on my family for free (of course) but they HAD to come to the salon on my regular work days to get it done, that did 2 things, first it made sure I would have everything I need to do their hair (all of my implements, proper chair, shampoo bowl…) and would not get hair in my home, next it insured my days off stayed my days off, everyone else I worked with were always complaining about having to do hair on their day off, someone in their family would always call, “…could you come over and cut/perm/color my hair on your next day off?”, their choice was to do it and forget about having your day off or say no and run the risk of pissing off some family member, especially if they did this on a regular basis, where do you draw the line? So when I quit doing hair, it was easy to just say NO to doing hair “on the side”. (END SIDE STORY)

Point is, I still remember how to do hair, it just had to come back to me, and fortunately for Bob, it all came back to me. I gave him a hair cut, used scissors on the top, he likes it a bit longer on top, then took off the guard and trimmed off his beard (left the moustache). I can’t believe …