Well, now it’s personal.
Actually, the impending Dr. Pepper Shortage in the link above comes at a good time for Gary. For years doctors and dentists have questioned Gary’s Dr. Pepper habit, and he finally began to listen to them. For three months he’s cut his Dr. Pepper consumption in half, if not more.
Perhaps he will start sipping them now like a rare fine wine.
26 responses to “Dr. Pepper Shortage”
I’m cranky about canning lids being gone. I did buy two packs in April, assuming that it would be harder to get them during the summer, but I underestimated what we’d want for the year. Sulk.
But yes. Really *relishing* each drop of that Dr. Pepper. 🙂
KC – you can? I can’t can.
Absolutely. When on an ultra-budget, food preservation was the way to go, and then I discovered that there are a lot of things that you just… can’t buy… the way you like them. (sort of like fried eggs; restaurant fried eggs are a disappointment about 80% of the time) Or that you can’t buy at all; cranberry-apple spread is so good, among others…
Okay, also, when on an ultra-budget and Required Christmas Presents exist towards those with a higher standard of living, homemade jam is basically the best way to go. You put time and effort and not much money into it during the summer whenever you can get fruit ultra-cheap; they get jam that *gasp* actually tastes like fruit instead of a Token Gift In Approximately The Correct Price Bracket (which they most likely do not want).
Now that we are not on an ultra-budget and various other circumstances have changed, we don’t can much. But I have initiated my husband into the Methods Of Water Bath Canning and thus we still can some (this year: two jars of pickled green beans from the Pandemic Garden out back; also some cordial). It is not that hard. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to want to do it. 🙂
KC – would not fly at my house – too much risk if properly sealed.
Full-sugar jam and adequately salted-and-vinegared pickles are actually no botulism risk even if not sealed; that’s specifically why they’re safe to water-bath can and not pressure-can (water bath doesn’t get hot enough to kill botulism spores, which can proliferate in anerobic conditions, so you have to make the contents of the can outside the botulism-can-cope-with-it range, which also eliminates a ton of other organisms, and the water bath canning itself eliminates a further set). Some jams can still grow specific types of mold, if not sealed, but with the pop-down lids, it’s easy to determine whether a can you take off the shelf has come un-sealed or not (in addition to “you can see mold”).
It’s trickier to identify a full seal without opening the jar (psss or pop noise, because you’re opening a partial vacuum if it’s sealed) with rubber rings, but still possible. But I am not enthused about trickier, so I go for the lids where you can both see and feel whether they’ve sealed; if they have not sealed, there’s a raised lump in the middle of the lid that you can “pop” down with your finger and which then “pops” back up again, and you can also visually identify whether it’s down or up.
(and it’s not even very good as fodder for conspiracy theories like “they just *want* you to think it’s safe!” because people have been canning this way for decades, with either very few problems or actually no problems that are not connected to “you screwed up” [literally the only cases I’ve read are of people who reduced the salt and vinegar amounts in pickles, or who water-bath-canned things that are Pressure Can Only, or who reduced the processing time, or similar “I don’t understand science, but surely cutting corners on the safety requirements will be totally fine” things].)
Oh! Also, wide-mouthed brand-name lids came back into stock when we were placing our grocery order, so now we have more. Yay! (I’d rather have regular ones, because we have *more* regular-mouth jars than wide-mouth ones, but eh, it should work, and the regular ones weren’t in stock, so: we’ll take it!)
KC – I have exactly three cans – very small half cup ones I bought when I was first doing sous-vide things. My grandmother did canning, and it involved paraffin and tongs. If meme Er rows of green beans and peaches. We always had Welch’s grape jelly, though.
Paraffin is… different. (also 100% not okay for green beans that are not pickled [or, I guess, heavily sweetened] but hey! You’re alive anyway! This is good.)
I think the effort/reward payoff for jam (or any of this, really) requires a specific jam consumption/enjoyment vs. effort/cost ratio, and if the people in your house go through gobs of it and prefer Welch’s grape jelly, I could well imagine throwing up your hands and saying “sure! you can have the cheap mostly-sugar thing! and I’ll skip hunting for cheap fruit and then spending hours and hours in the extremely hot kitchen turning it into jam and canning it!”
KC – so canning when it comes to grape jelly can be MORE expensive? No thank you!
It’s partly an ingredients thing (see also grocery store cakes vs. cakes made from actual not-dried-eggs and actual butter and actual vanilla extract)(plus the cost of glass jars vs. plastic, although if you reuse your jars, then that amortizes, and if you get them at garage sales/thrift stores, they can be quite cheap) and partly a scale thing, but yes, 100%, canning can be more expensive than just buying the cheap version of things at the store. The cheap grocery store jelly is mostly sugar and water; it’s hard to match that price point with anything but deeply-discounted or free fruit.
(that said, if you grow grapes, your own grape jelly can be cheaper than store-bought because it doesn’t require the addition of purchased pectin like most jams/jellies prefer; grape peels have plenty of pectin to “set” lots of things; ditto with apple/crabapple jelly; thus, recipes before store-bought pectin often call for part apple or part grape and then part whatever-fruit-the-jelly/jam-is, so your raspberry jelly is actually apple-raspberry jelly.)
(this also works out this way, sometimes, for other canned goods; tomatoes are canned *right where the tomatoes are grown* so there’s less loss of product and minimal shipping costs until you’re shipping canned goods. If you buy tomatoes in the store, you’re paying for fast, careful freight to get those tomatoes to you with minimal spoiling and bruising, plus the cost of all the “ugly” tomatoes and tomatoes that died on the way or that are expected to be “lost” in the grocery store produce section turnover. So, generally, unless things are a loss-leader or on clearance, it’s more expensive to can grocery store produce than to buy cans of it already canned. The main exception to this is specialty stuff: high-fruit-content jams or unusual combinations or very-specific items (like “single apple variety” applesauce) which are Extra Fancy Specialty Items to buy pre-made. Those you can sometimes/often make cheaper – kind of like how you can often make “fancy bakery that uses real ingredients” cakes cheaper at home than buying them from the bakery.)
But therefore, if you make the kind of jam that would cost $8 or more per jar if you bought it in the grocery store, and make it homemade so that the work is part of the gift – then it might work out to $1.50/jar with fruit and pectin and sugar and the glass jar, *and* be more acceptable as a gift to, say, a reasonably wealthy PhD supervisor or aunts/uncles than a $20 bottle of wine would be (and certainly, uh, substantially less eyebrow-raising than a 99-cent jar of store-brand jam or a $2 jar of Welch’s). So that is a *very* budget-friendly use for home-canned goods.
Also it’s really hard to find dilly beans in the store, and those are very worth having. and if you can get your produce cheap/free and re-use your jars instead of only doing canning one year and then getting rid of all of them, then it can work out to be cost-saving for some “regular” things as well – you just always want to do the math on the things where the grocery-store generic is acceptable…
KC – well, it makes sense then that my grandmother canned, because they eventually lived on a farm, and I think they had a victory garden before that. And they fished in the Mississippi for catfish, I remember. Oh, and squirrel casserole, we had that. The catfish was wonderful, and the canned peaches. The squirrel casserole was bland. At any rate, I think canning is not going to be one of my hobbies. It would be like the cheese making, I would spend money and time an end up with a lesser product.
I did cheese-making when I had access to an inexpensive basically-organic dairy with a small retail store in their packaging plant, but otherwise: yeah, nope. and even then: not often!
But yes! If you’re generating enough produce in your own garden, then you can it so that you can eat things that are not cabbage in the winter, and if you reuse the jars, then you’ve got the initial cost for the jars, and a small cost for whatever you use to seal the jars (unless you re-use rubber rings, which you can do for a while), and… that’s it.
Aside from all your work, that is. Which is… non-trivial.
But yes, unless you want to can (either because you think it is fun/satisfying in itself, or you have a free/cheap produce source and want to save a small amount of money, or because you have things you want to eat that just aren’t really sold out there but that you can produce yourself, or whatever), I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to can in Today’s American Suburbs. But that’s approximately the same for most semi-productive hobbies: knitting, sewing (oh, the cost of most home-made quilts vs. the cost of an equivalently-warm comforter from a big box store!), making your own beer/cheese/wine, vegetable gardening. Some of them can be done in such a way as to “save” money, but mostly they cost more, and that is *fine* if they are being a hobby – no one is demanding that golf or playing video games be remunerative. Anyway. I don’t think it makes any sense for you to take up canning; if you wanted to, you could, because it is Not Actually Hard (the Ball Blue Book is great for beginners and very food-safe), but there are a lot of things that any given person could do (learn to ride a unicycle! learn Bulgarian! collect rubber bands! make your own noodles!) and if you don’t want to and also don’t need to: NOPE.
KC – my concern is that I will run out of hobbies some day, and then It will be down to canning, knitting, or learning a new language. I don’t want to learn a new language. Although … evidently Alexa can speak other languages.
(Moments later: Switching Gary’s Alexa so she speaks French.)
KC – sadly Alexa answered my test question of “what time is it” en Francais. But she was stumped by Gary’s command to set an alarm, so the jig was up, damnit.
Also a fear along with eyesight: arthritis.
Based on heredity, arthritis seems to result in reduced fine motor capabilities. Heeey hands! But yes, that too.
KC – I do know I have some arthritis in my back, an MRI told me, so I imagine it will show up in my hands someday.
In my mid-twenties, I had my knuckle joints swell up to an amazing degree when I had been piping really stiff frosting for 14 hours straight (wedding cake, 2am, not abnormal in the Good Old Days) and went “oh. Well, that’s worrying.” but they were back to normal the next day. Basically, between that and heredity, I’m probably more or less doomed to at least some hand-wise by 70 or so unless Great Arthritis Cures are found between now and whenever “then” is exactly. That said, relatives have continued to do hand hobbies well into arthritis – in some cases, changing the scale (one grandma went from crocheting doilies to crocheting yarn afghans) and in other cases swapping out hobbies based on good day/bad day – on a good day, fairly small cross-stitch; on a medium day, knitting with regular yarn or doing puzzles; on a bad day, reading.
Some people have arthritis in some places and not in others, so maybe your back won’t be generous and share with your hands? Maybe? Or maybe there will be Great Arthritis Cures, or hobbies one can control with an EEG machine (I mean, technically, there already are mechanical drawing tools where the EEG input varies the automatic-drawing output slightly, but you probably don’t want to code up device interfaces in your spare time. Probably.).
KC – there will be no cures. But, there will be treatments that are increasingly effective, so effective that it will be like not having arthritis.
Yeah, I lazily count treatments so effective that you don’t even know you have the thing as “cures” (especially if they’re one-offs rather than something you have to take each day or have re-done every year).
I mean, as long as the treatments don’t cause delusions. I’m not sure that would be okay with me. But I’d like there to be more effective arthritis fixes!
KC – are there any effective arthritis treatments? Gary tried Celebrex put it made him too ill.
Someone I know swears by the non-generic version of MoveFree (and she’s normally a Cheapest Generics Possible Because It’s The Same Thing person); for her it was difference between being able to navigate full flights of stairs vs. not (the generics that she initially assumed would do the trick didn’t do anything). and a former neighbor’s mother’s dog (this sounds very distant, but while I was visiting the neighborhood, I saw her and the dog in question that she had inherited) apparently couldn’t walk much at all due to arthritis, but dosed-down MoveFree meant that the dog was running around (which: I cannot speak to the former condition of the dog, but the dog was most definitely very mobile while I observed it). But of course, two anecdotes do not equal data. That said, if I had arthritis, that’s the first thing I’d try. Apparently there are often coupons. I think it took less than a month for noticeable results in both cases, so that at least gives a time frame for the “nope, it’s not doing anything, I’m not spending this cash anymore” decision.
(okay, actually, if I had arthritis, first I’d got to pubmed and dig through controlled trials and whatnot because I am a research junkie. But if there weren’t any obvious winners on that or on the actual-FDA-controlled-ingredients medication front, I’d go for the movefree and ask my doctor about whether there is arthritis PT where I could get a really complete rundown of things to do/things to avoid.)
(and also-also, since I know a very intelligent-in-business-and-programming guy who fainted due to low blood pressure due to an overdose of curcumin supplements since More Is Of Course Better: I don’t know of any overdose indications for MoveFree, but as always, more is not always better even with Natural Supplements, etc., etc. even if you are a Manly Man and such, and just go for the dosage as per the bottle.)
KC – well the Amazon reviews are pretty enthusiastic. I couldn’t find any peer-reviewed stuff. Perhaps there will be something better by the time I get the arthritis. (That how my family always said it, “the arthritis.”)
I spotted this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4649492/ – and there’s also an entire wikipedia article (which is a giant mess and has not apparently been updated since that study came out?)
*But* they’re unregulated and who knows what’s in any given batch at any given time, which is lousy. Harrumph.
The arthritis is out to get us! 🙂 Makes (some, limited) sense to me…
KC – also, Arthur Itis, because grandpa’s name was Arthur. I always think if an over the counter drug was any good the pharmacy would make it require a prescription and charge me]ore. Remember when Nexium required a prescription, then they realized it was fairly useless and made it OTC?
Supplements are different, though, because there are whole laundry lists of things you can’t patent, and glucosamine-chondritin may be in that bucket, which renders the R&D (to get a Prescription approved by the FDA) inadequately financially remunerative to a specific company, because then once one company did the studies such that they can actually make claims about what this does, all the other pharmaceutical companies can produce *the exact same thing* but without the research overhead costs and thus undercut them.
Our system is pretty weird, to be honest. It’s surprising it works as well as it does?
KC – I don’t think much of supplements, except for the vitamin D, and I think that’s’ because the doctor prescribed it.