Sarasota Soundings

Vendor at the Red Barn, Bradenton

You may have noticed that we haven’t been posting for a couple of weeks. What began as a glitch with one of our Websites escalated to become a calamity for all of them, causing us to leave our former hosting service and sign on with a new one (thanks to a very practical referral from our new friend, Skip Dyrda). But we’ve put all the pieces back together, so now we’re back in business.

As we’ve made this transition, we’ve been reviewing the archived content of our sites. We’re surprised to find that it’s been nearly a year since we chronicled our experiment, Living on $42.00 per Week, shopping and dining within the Food Stamp budget. Having reviewed our experience, we thought it would be a good idea to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re headed in the year to come.

The stark answer is that we don’t know. The changes we’ve made in our lives since last year have more to do with energy conservation than diet.

Given what has happened to the cost of fuel, and how that has affected virtually every other service and product we use, our thoughts have gone far beyond the inadequacies of the Food Stamp program.

One of our friends, who runs a deli in Sarasota, says the Italian-American bakery delivering his fresh bread has raised the price three times since February. But the Publix 5-pound bag of unbleached flour had been the same price for a year—until a few weeks ago. That tells us that there weren’t too many other home bakers depleting existing shelf stock. However, a product requiring less time and manipulation than flour—dried pasta—has doubled in price.

The retail prices of virtually all foods have risen over the course of the past year—most dramatically in the last four months. Eggs and milk have been climbing steadily and grain products have bolted. Crude oil gets a lot of press, but the increased volatility of food commodities make trading in rice, wheat, and corn qualify as an extreme sport.

Canned goods have gone up, too, and we see far fewer specials. There doesn’t seem to be a 14 oz. tin of anything on offer for less than half a dollar. Where have those once-frequent two-for-one sales gone?

Up at Bradenton’s Red Barn, our former haunt for produce, a week’s worth of fresh vegetables herbs, and fruit for two cooks like us now costs $14 – $16 per week. Last year, we usually spent $10 – $11.

So we are shopping closer to home, buying more things from the Saturday morning market downtown—whether our purchases are the pricey organic items or “conventional” produce from the wholesale market in Tampa. If we factor in gas at $4 a gallon, we save the 25 mile round-trip to Bradenton and at least a gallon of gas by staying here in town. And we give up two things we really care about: the broader selection of Latin produce and the pleasure of eavesdropping on fellow shoppers chatting in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and a host of Asian and Slavic languages.

Gas, of course, is the big topic of conversation for everyone today—up a third from the price this time last year. We, the cheerful, resourceful foodies. have to admit: it casts a cloud over our daily lives.

The Farm Bill—which contains amendments to the Food Stamp program—remains in limbo. Anticipated are: Congressional approval, Presidential veto, and ultimate override of the veto. How much the weekly Food Stamp allotment stood to increase—if at all—was never clear.

But we stand firm on one thing: Food Stamps won’t alleviate American hunger and malnutrition unless education is a major component of the program. Rampant obesity among our poorest citizens demonstrates that knowing how to choose and prepare nutritionally and economically sensible meals is not an innate skill.

Even for people as savvy as we consider ourselves to be, the grocery store can be a hornet’s nest of nutritional traps. Last week we bought a loaf of multi-grain whole wheat bread only to discover later, on tasting, that it was heavily sweetened. Why? High fructose corn syrup prolongs shelf life for all those centrally baked loaves trucked around the country. It’s not only wheat prices that are making your daily bread more costly. Oil runs farm equipment, the power plants that keep bread ovens baking, and the trucks that deliver the bread.

We’re all caught in the same down-draft but we’d like to think we can help you cope as we and others rethink, adapt, and innovate.

For starters, we’re using our pressure cooker a lot more now. We’ve written about how easy—and energy-efficient—it is to cook beans. Of late, we’ve expanded our repertoire to include potatoes, yams, and beets. We’ve found them to be perfectly whole and cooked through with just five minutes under pressure. After that, we turn off the heat, not opening the cooker until at least an hour later (when the pot has cooled). And if you don’t open the lid and break the seal, the veggies can wait for more than a day, unrefrigerated, until you need them.

As we’ve said, nutritional/culinary education is vital. A can of tuna, beyond serving as the base for the all-American tuna salad, can become Salad Niçoise, Provençal tuna salad; Condiglione, Italian tuna salad; Pain Bagnat, tuna grinder from the South of France; or Pasta with Tuna Sauce. This information is readily available on the Internet—from library computers if necessary—and in cookbooks from library shelves. And none of these dishes requires a can of cream of mushroom soup.

Think about foods that can be multi-purpose. As we wrote last year, a take-out rotisserie chicken—although not eligible on the Food Stamp allotment—can be two, and possibly three, meals for two people.

If you must snack, make it carrot sticks. Those zany “home economists” from a couple of generations ago certainly didn’t know half of what we know today about basic nutrition, but they had the right idea. While high fructose corn syrup may not be the nutritional demon it’s been made out to be, it remains insidious, unnecessary, and best avoided when possible.

If we could impart only one piece of advice, it would be: Share your meals. Turn off the TV; don’t answer the phone.Whatever you bring to the table, sit down with the people you love. Make the time.

Links to the rest of the posts in our series:

Living on $42.00 Per Week—the Challenge
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 1
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 2
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 3
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 4
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 5
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 6
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Day 7
Living on $42.00 Per Week—Summary

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Usually, when I write about oil, it’s Extra Virgin. But today I mean the stuff that comes out of the ground. I have a close friend, a travel consultant, who arranges high-end gastronomic tours in the Mediterranean. She has a client who has asked her to investigate the possibility of flying to Turkey by private jet. Having been a private pilot for a few years, I’ve had some exposure to this rarefied level of travel. So I was only too happy help her with a little “aviation consultation,” Googling to see what was available.

Travel by private jet has always been expensive. It used to be that the airfare for the type of jet that could get you from Minneapolis to Istanbul with minimal impact on your Circadian rhythms would set you back an amount about equal to the price of a semester at an elite private college in New England. Today, the airfare has risen enough to see a student through Freshman, Sophomore, and most of Junior year.

“Well, oil is $124.00 per barrel. What do you expect?” say the folks who ordinarily travel coach on tickets they got online with 21-day advance purchases. But it got me thinking about why oil—and thus, gas—has become so expensive.

In an election year, it’s easy to place blame on “foreigners.” When it’s a question of discretionary travel, we know some zany Saudi sheiks who leave their Gulfstream Vs in the hangar in favor of their personal Boeing 747s. Or, we could keep our criticisms focused on the über consumers who bought Hummers and SUVs, just to be sure their little nippers had enough room to stretch out to watch DVDs in the back seat on the way to soccer practice. Meanwhile, the green and lean among us maintain we’re driving too much anyway.

But consider the following news item from Thomson Financial News Service: speaking at a conference in Vienna yesterday, the Secretary General of OPEC said, “…commercial oil stocks remained above the five-year average. Meanwhile, U.S. crude inventories rose about 6 million barrels last week, which showed that the oil market was well-supplied.” He went on to say that in tracking recent oil shipments, member countries couldn’t even find buyers for OPEC’s additional oil supply.

As for SUVs, Americans finally seem to have gotten the memo. Ford has recently made dire predictions about expected earnings shortfalls because of a 28% drop in sales of their SUV line. And are we driving too much? Maybe, but we’re certainly driving less. Unless you drive for a living, you’re very likely motoring as little as possible because of how much more it costs to “fill ‘er up.”

So what IS moving the price of oil? Would you believe me if I said, “an orthodontist in Dayton, Ohio? A school principal in Idaho? A retired CPA in Hilton Head?”

Well, for those of you who remember when we actually had to sit across a desk, face-to-face with our stockbrokers, think back. In the 50’s, we loved Xerox and IBM. In the mid-60’s, we had turned our affection to ‘plastics.’ By the late 70’s and early 80’s, we were agog with Apple. By then, investment bankers were whistling the tune of leveraged buyouts while the kid next door learned to trade stocks online. The guys who used to guffaw over pin-ups at the local Texaco station were now bragging about when they’d bought Intel. Anyone could belong to the investment club and lots of people joined when there was no longer anyone to tell them they couldn’t—or shouldn’t.

We rolled into—and out of—junk bonds and sexy high-tech companies with spectacular “burn” rates, but no tangible products or earnings. We danced in and out of real estate bubbles, and over the past nine months, we’ve skidded along with the mortgage meltdown.

Now, allow me to introduce the ETF, or Exchange Traded Fund. Yes, the ink is barely dry on the bailout deal with Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan, and here comes another “derivative investment vehicle.” (Actually, the ETF has been around since 1989. But with the Dow fluctuating like a seismograph near the top of an active volcano, and common stocks having lost their luster, and mutual funds about as exciting as watching mime, the ETF has been rejuvenated as a glamour investment tool that gives the average Joe the illusion of running with the big dogs.)

Our orthodontist in Dayton, and a lot of his golfing buddies are now directing their investment cash into crude oil ETFs. They are speculating on the rising prices and this means that they, too, have a piece of the action when commodity traders are shouting in the pits at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Of course, our boys could buy ETFs for green coffee, pork bellies, or frozen orange juice concentrate, but none of those provides the high testosterone rush of OIL. Right now, oil is a straight shot—upward. Viagra for your beleaguered portfolio. Oil will get you that new Mercedes, pay for the Lasik surgery vacation in Cabo San Lucas, or simply make you feel like a Master of the Universe. If the creators and buyers of ETFs know how precarious the market is, they don’t seem ready to bail out. But if they don’t, they could drown in the very commodity that is currently keeping their Chris Craft afloat.

Just as a great many real estate investors got mortgages on houses they never intended to inhabit, many oil investors are buying ETFs for quantities of oil that will never go into the family furnace or mini-van.

Producers—and that includes American oil producers in Texas, California, and Louisiana—couldn’t be happier. In an ideal world, a futures contract is a tool enabling a producer or grower of a commodity to plan ahead by locking in a future market price. Oil producers have locked in prices that are making them very happy indeed. So happy, in fact, that they can begin to slow their production. And when they do, the demand—even normal demand—will cause prices to rise further, because there will be lower reserves. And the cycle will repeat itself until we reach some kind of tipping point. Then, investors like our orthodontist will begin to go the other way—cashing in or bailing out—as they sell their futures contracts. That is, they’ll begin betting that the price of crude oil will go down at some time in the future, as it surely will. And when it does, guess what? Gas will still be expensive, because producers and refiners will have scaled back; supplies will be low.

Everyone from the NYMEX trading pits to Peoria and Pasadena was listening when the suits at Goldman Sachs recently predicted the price of crude will reach $200 per barrel. But even if prices don’t reach that level, we should recognize that we’re in yet another bubble. And when it bursts, I foresee a protracted mop-up. In any event, I offer the following, infallible advice to the economists planning our future: “if you’re going to predict, do it often.”

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Not quite a year ago, Sarasota began buzzing with the news that Fred’s Restaurant in Southside had closed its doors “for renovations.” Of course, we learned later that those renovations referred more to paper restructuring and property divestiture than to sheet-rock and two-by-fours.

After that, the palm trees wrapped in twinkle lights went dark; Fred’s sat fallow for nearly seven months.

This morning, barely six months after Fred’s splashy reopening in December of 2007, Southside residents will be chewing on the news that Fred’s has closed—again. This time around, the message is unambiguous: a simple sign on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper proclaims “Fred’s Restaurant has gone out of business. Thank you.”

Talk about eye-openers. This cocktail has more ingredients than a fusion martini: chutzpah, anticipation, high-rolling risk, and glitz. And now, the chasers: at least one part schadenfreud and more than a dash of bitters.

A lot of hard-working and optimistic people are out on the street, where there are fewer and fewer places they can fill out a job application. And those places don’t hold nearly the promise that Fred’s II once did.

All of this is especially sobering for us. Late in 2007, we had been part of the cheering section for the “the new Fred’s.”

But this obit is even more stunning because it hits with the news that Petrella Bros. on the South Trail locked its doors just before this past weekend. Sadly, these closures speak volumes about the current vulnerability of many of the more ambitious restaurants in Sarasota.

Those sub-prime mortgages built a super-sized house of cards. As the collapse of our local economy claims an ever-growing list of casualties, we hope that the restaurant professionals with talent and experience have the reserves and optimism to tough it out. If they do, they’ll be the first to benefit when the financial chaos subsides.

In the meantime, the lawyers, bankers, locksmiths, and auctioneers are too busy to cook. The out-of-town investors don’t know where to get the best meals… now their choices have narrowed by two. And who will feed the vultures?

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How did we get invited to an evening fashion show and wine tasting at a hair salon? Despite its smart graphics, the email invitation gave no clue.

We phoned the salon and asked the pert British girl who answered. “I don’t know,” she said, “but, it doesn’t matter. Please come!”

We wondered if we’d be sipping wine amidst lighteners, brighteners, and conditioners as models tried to slink around shampoo sinks and manicure stations. And, knowing what we know about Sarasota, we were virtually certain the whole affair would be a thinly veiled hustle for something.

But as we had other errands on Lido, we decided to accept the invitation. We were throughly delighted to discover that our assumptions and reservations had been completely off-base and unfounded.

The fashion show was in full swing when we arrived at Les Ciseaux, a second-storey salon overlooking St. Armand’s Circle. The shop was pulsating in genuine celebration.

Angela Johnston, longtime team-member, had bought the entire business and was sharing the rewards of hard work. Seizing an opportunity to party with her co-workers, friends, clients, and community, she, too, was clearly having a grand time. Her young daughter in pipe-curls frolicked with other children. Angela’s sister, niece, and dad had flown in from England. We realized then that we’d been invited simply because we were folks from Angela’s neighborhood. (We’d just never known where she worked.)

The DJ was thoughtful enough to place his speakers on the balcony, outside the entrance to the shop, so the music and patter were audible but didn’t impede conversation. Because Les Ciseaux is a salon, mirrors are everywhere, but guests last night seemed more interested in each other than in their own reflections. The crowd was multi-generational and multi-ethnic. Lots of perfectly coiffed, pretty young things, but even friends with bad hair (or in a few cases, NO HAIR) felt welcome. Toddlers bounced around to rock and hip-hop. Their grandparents settled into cushy chairs.

What was really notable about this event was that NO ONE tried to market anything, even though Les Ciseaux—or any business with a St Armand’s rent to pay—can’t forget the bottom line. One had the feeling that this was truly a night off. The fashion show was laid back. No one named prices or said you’d have to diet for a year to fit into the little numbers from Foxy Lady, modeled by real women between twenty and fifty.

Two very suave bartenders with ready smiles poured wines as well as an arresting turquoise concoction: a nouvelle martini with fresh mint and Blue Curaçao liqueur.

For us, the tip-off that this really was a party, and not a promotion, was the food. Here was a buffet that did not scream its components had come from Sam’s Club. Many people had actually taken the time to prepare REAL FOOD. And it’s amazing how rare that has become.

Each offering was thoughtfully labeled with a small, delicately lettered tent-card so there was no mistaking that these were dishes someone had made, not bought. The diverse contributions of Peruvian potato salad; Ethiopian lentils with injera bread; homemade guacamole; silky, cumin-laced hummus bi tahina; and some very seductive sweets spoke volumes about how Angela’s friends and co-workers feel about her and her achievement.

Congratulations, Angela! Snip, snip, hooray! We wish you great success.

Les Ciseaux
St. Armands Circle
6 N Blvd of Presidents
Sarasota, FL 34236
941.338.2176

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