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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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The Enduring Appeal of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Processed Snack

Courtesy of Planters

The ingredients and production of Cheez Balls and Dunkaroos are murky, but these snacks retain a nostalgic pull for anyone who ate junk food in the ’90s

“It’s one part nostalgia, one part pure love for cheddar-dusted corn snacks,” says Lindsay DiMarcello, a 29-year-old freelance editor and proofreader, of Planters Cheez Balls, the gumball-sized puffed corn snack in a blue canister. “I remember being very small and sitting under a coffee table in my living room that was right next to a heater vent, and eating a whole can.”

In 2006, Planters discontinued the snack, and in 2014, DiMarcello published a petition on Change.org called “Bring back Planters Cheez Balls and P.B. Crisps!” It received 818 signatures, a reasonably small response. One day, during the summer of 2018, she opened the front door of her home in Oaks, Pennsylvania, to a camera crew recording her.

She had nearly forgotten about the petition by then, but when she saw a peanut-shaped trailer parked in her driveway and someone in a full-body Mr. Peanut costume, she figured it out: Planters, the nut brand owned by the Kraft Heinz food conglomerate, was bringing back the snack. The Planters marketing team had gotten in touch with her boyfriend, who helped plan the surprise visit to coincide with the relaunch.

“I still desperately miss P.B. Crisps. It sucks that didn’t happen,” says DiMarcello.

“There is a bit of a nostalgic halo to the brand,” says Samantha Hess, brand manager at Kraft Heinz; compared to other bright orange cheese powder-dusted corn puffs on the market, she believes Cheez Balls excels. Around since the late 1970s, the product was most popular in the ’80s and ’90s, she explains, and that’s why Kraft Heinz marketed the relaunch as a throwback to the ’90s. It was shelved in the mid-2000s as part of an effort by the company to refocus on its core products: nuts. The look and taste of the snack have been carefully preserved to assure customers that it’s the same product they remember. The only noticeable difference is a burst on the canister that reads: “It’s Back.”

“You’re seeing products that pretend to be healthy and others that have no pretense at all — it’s just pure junk food.”

Cheez Balls are not the only ’90s snack food to reappear. The Coca-Cola Company reintroduced its discontinued soda Surge in 2014, also employing a ’90s nostalgia marketing strategy. General Mills recently announced Dunkaroos will return this year, writing on its blog, “’90s kids now have a new reason to rejoice.” The kangaroo-shaped cookies in a plastic tray with a pool of frosting for dipping, which were available in the U.S. from 1990 to 2012, had received shout-outs from Kim Kardashian West, Chrissy Teigen, and Lilly Singh.

With today’s ’90s kids in their late 20s and 30s, big food makers are tapping into deep reserves of childhood brand recognition for their “new” items. “It costs a lot of money to introduce and market new products, so you see a lot of repackaging and re-introductions of old stuff that was successful,” says Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which explores the ways that big food companies have engineered snack foods to be addictive.

But, like Bill and Ted thrust into another era, many totally, righteously ’90s snacks are an odd fit for a consumer base that increasingly demands more healthful and wholesome foods. Moss describes a divergence in thinking among the biggest food companies that took place around 2017. Confronted with declining sales, as more people became concerned with what they were eating, some packaged food companies resolved to sell more good-for-you products, or at least the illusion of that.

“But then you saw another part of the industry that was like, screw that, there’s always going to be a few million people who are just in it for the craving and the fix,” says Moss. These companies chose to double down on junk food. “That’s why you’re seeing products that pretend to be healthy and others that have no pretense at all — it’s just pure junk food.”

Today, though, these cheap-calorie snacks sit beside plenty of alternatives that tout their healthful virtues. Could nostalgia give them an edge? Troubled since almost the day the two food giants merged in 2015, Kraft Heinz appears to be gambling on that approach with its Cheez Balls comeback campaign. And General Mills, a conglomerate whose biggest business, breakfast cereals, is in the midst of a long and well-publicized sales decline, might be testing a parachute with its Dunkaroos revival. Forget the healthful hyperbole. Forget the barnyard imagery and “Harvest Cheddar” flavor names, even. This time, going back in time to a simpler place means forgetting everything you ever learned about high-fructose corn syrup.

“One of the addictive properties of a cheese puff is when you put it in your mouth and press your tongue onto the roof of your mouth, the puff dissolves because it gets half of its calories from fat,” says Moss.

In food manufacturing, this phenomenon is called “vanishing caloric density”: the notion that when a food is so light that it requires little chewing, the brain doesn’t signal that you are overeating.

Then there’s “dynamic contrast” — essentially, exciting variations in textures and colors, as with Oreo cookies or Dunkaroos. This, says Moss, is just how humans are wired: “The brain loves information for information’s sake, so the more ways you can excite the brain, the better.” According to some studies, Moss says, people — like animals — are attracted to bright colors when shopping for food; this is something that the food industry discovered way back in the 1950s and ’60s. “Which is why the grocery store, when you walk in, you’re just faced with neon colors,” he says.

“If you look at the space these products take up in a supermarket, it’s evident they’ve got a hold on our brains,” says Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect.

Much of the appeal of junk food items comes from the natural and artificial flavorings added to them. In the flavor labs Schatzker has visited, scientists work to reproduce the chemical compounds in certain real foods to add to food products. The problem with engineering brilliant flavors, he says, is creating an addictive snack out of a morsel that you wouldn’t otherwise want or need to eat much of. Like extruded cornmeal.

“They all kind of run on the same formula, which is a processed carb with flavor powder on it,” says Schatzker of cheese-coated corn-based snacks. “It’s hard to stop eating them because they’re engineered to be continued to be eaten.”

Despite the scientific precision of the nutritional information printed on food packaging, it can be almost impossible to understand what, exactly, many food products are. Or to visualize how they’re made. And few foods are less transparent than Cheez Balls and Dunkaroos; unlike potato chips, a cheese ball represents nothing organic, and with their uniform, molded shapes and plentiful packaging, Dunkaroos are emphatically not just-like-homemade. They’re a throwback to a time before artisanal, small-batch, and all-natural messaging would dominate labels, and meet-the-maker videos flourished.

Kraft Heinz declined to describe how Cheez Balls are made, and few people seem to wonder about their production. But it turns out that cheese curls, puffs, balls, and doodles were invented around 1939 by an animal feed manufacturer in Wisconsin, as Ernie Smith explored for Atlas Obscura. When a grinder jammed, an employee ran some wet corn through the machinery and discovered that it puffed up while exiting the grinder. He seasoned the corn, and the resulting snack was eventually called Korn Kurls. According to the University of Wisconsin, employees of the animal feed company continued to experiment with frying techniques and flavorings, like cheese powder.

“It’s hard to stop eating them because they’re engineered to be continued to be eaten.”

Extruded cornmeal-based snacks are everywhere now. And they’re not just snacks; biodegradable packing peanuts, made from cornstarch or other edible, food-based starches, are created using the same kind of process with high-heat extruders. A representative for Puffy Stuff, a biodegradable packing peanut company, told me on the phone that they’re entirely edible. “We joke around and we eat them,” she said. I’ll admit to letting one or two of these things dissolve in my mouth, too. And if you break apart a cornstarch-based packing peanut and smell the inside, it will remind you of a cheese curl.

“In the ’80s and ’90s there was an explosion of processed food,” says Kristin Lawless, a nutritionist and author of Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture. Behind the shift in supermarket shelves was a significant change in industrial farming. Around this time, Monsanto, founded as a chemical company, began stepping up its efforts in biotechnology, producing corn and soy along with pesticides to control them. Corn and soy, Lawless explains, “are the backbone ingredients of all processed foods.”

Just as this year’s relaunch of Planters Cheez Balls required elaborate marketing efforts, these products were heavily advertised to their target audience. As processed corn- and soy-based products proliferated in the ’90s, Saturday morning cartoons were bookended by commercials for a wacky range of foods marketed to children — like bouncing cartoon kangaroo-shaped cookies. And the boom in processed food followed an increase in advertising focused on African-American consumers during the ’70s.

“With the rise of more ethnic market research firms and advertising agencies, the big companies, like Quaker Oats and General Mills, really concentrated on promoting the use of convenience foods for traditional, black cuisine and encouraging the consumption of packaged foods,” says Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Because African Americans tend to have less access to health care and fewer choices in the marketplace for quality groceries, on top of the stresses caused by racism, says Chatelain, they’ve been particularly impacted by this kind of eating.

Before the 2000s, most people had never heard of GMOs. Americans had no way of knowing whether they were eating trans fats, let alone that they were bad for you and would eventually be banned. Eric Schlosser hadn’t written Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan hadn’t imbued omnivores with a best-selling dilemma. Millennials are definitely not the first generation with highly processed comfort foods — boomers have that unique honor. But during the ’90s, the processed food industry was on a serious modified food starch high.

“I’m tasting the Dunkaroo in my mind and it is so sweet and texturally very satisfying, and it just brings me back to the playground,” says Eve Turow Paul, a consultant and author of the upcoming book Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning.

She sees the reboots of Dunkaroos and Cheez Balls as a way of tapping into a shared memory or identity, and finding community around that. Given the performative aspect of tweeting about Dunkaroos or “liking” a Facebook group calling for the return of a discontinued snack, a nostalgic food can take on an almost meme-like quality. It’s less about making informed food choices than indulging in an escapist pleasure. “You are essentially excusing yourself from your general adult worries in life,” she says. But memes aren’t necessarily appetizing.

“To be honest, if I saw those in a store, I would probably point them out to my husband and be like, ‘Oh my god, remember Dunkaroos?’” Turow Paul says. “But I probably wouldn’t buy them.”

Nostalgia is a formidable, and some might say toxic, force that defines a large chunk of the U.S. restaurant industry, so it’s no surprise that packaged goods manufacturers are using this theme to sell their products, too. Perhaps the most famous food associated with nostalgia is the madeleine recalled in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This singular, shell-shaped tea biscuit spurs a flurry of memories for the narrator. If, as the novel implies, everyone has their own madeleine memories — locked deep in the subconscious and accessible only with a certain key — perhaps we all have one food that succeeds above all others in triggering our memories. And maybe we should indulge in it from time to time, Red 40 and all.

Lindsay DiMarcello, who started the Cheez Balls petition, still loves dipping them in chocolate milkshakes, a habit she picked up as a kid. A dynamic contrast if there ever was, she says, the salty cheddar dust paired with sweet, cold chocolate ice cream is deliciously balanced.

But, she adds, “This also works great with Herr’s Cheese Curls.”

Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3cZGiP0 https://ift.tt/3cUa5bF

Courtesy of Planters

The ingredients and production of Cheez Balls and Dunkaroos are murky, but these snacks retain a nostalgic pull for anyone who ate junk food in the ’90s

“I still desperately miss P.B. Crisps. It sucks that didn’t happen,” says DiMarcello.

“You’re seeing products that pretend to be healthy and others that have no pretense at all — it’s just pure junk food.”

“If you look at the space these products take up in a supermarket, it’s evident they’ve got a hold on our brains,” says Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect.

“It’s hard to stop eating them because they’re engineered to be continued to be eaten.”

But, she adds, “This also works great with Herr’s Cheese Curls.”

Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3cZGiP0 via Blogger https://ift.tt/2KEzgmz

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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bu11d0g-blog1 · 5 years ago

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Finding Fulfillment Within Yourself

Table of Contents Introduction Self-Awareness The Grass is Greener Where Fulfillment Comes From A Case Study The Ego And Superego The Journey

Introduction

To fulfill something is to “bring into actuality.” It is a measurement in satisfaction and can note the completion or end of something (Websters New Riverside University Dictionary, 1984). What this means for you and the rest of us is that fulfillment is that thing we constantly seek. It’s an unfortunate and objective fact that we are all born with this innate feeling that there is room for improvement within us. It’s an evolutionary component which developed from centuries of raw survival. Subjectively, this feeling or drive to improve is often felt by some to be some sort of inadequacy or broken thing inside us. When this sort of dysfunctional process occurs, we look to fill a void rather than use the drive to improve. Most simply put… We’re born naked, cold, and screaming bloody murder. We’re never born alone because from that moment on, we’re on a journey of development and growth. This particular journey is bumpy, curvy, scary, unfair, amazing, thrilling, and worth it. That’s also the point. Unfortunately, many people look at their lives and look for the end point, or the destination as a measure of their happiness and success, meaning that they look at the current state of their lives and bemoan everything they don’t have or have failed to achieve and denigrate their existence for those failures or shortcomings. The point they forget is that the journey isn’t over. They’re not at the end point. They’re just ruminating, and judging. Finding fulfillment in your life isn’t about where you end up. We all end up in one of 2 places. In the ground or in an urn. That’s the end point. Until then, it’s the journey. That being said, it’s the journey that matters here. The journey is the point of life. So, finding fulfillment isn’t an end goal or destination. It’s a part of the map.

Self-Awareness

You can do all of the exercises, activities, self-development steps, and meditating you want. Until you understand You, fulfillment will remain a distant dream always beyond tomorrows horizon. Our whole lives we’re told to focus on the future. In early childhood we’re taught our colors, shapes, and numbers so that we can be on the same level as our peers as we enter school. We’re told to get good grades so that we can get into a decent college, and maybe get a scholarship. To that same end, we’re told to mind our manners, and keep track of our popularity polls lest college admissions find an unfavorable tweet. Then we’re told to pick the right major or vocation. This is a decision made so early in life that many of us get to middle age to discover a mistake from our childhood. So, we go looking for fulfillment elsewhere. Those who are really brave make a professional change in order to find fulfillment. Because we can’t find fulfillment in one area of our lives, we look for it in others with lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, denial, regression, dissociation, compartmentalization, projection, etc.… For every unfulfilled life, there is a mechanism for coping with that lack of joy and happiness. Specifically, what is the most occurring reason for divorce? Anybody know? The top two tend to be infidelity and money. Beyond that, bickering, weight gain, unrealistic expectations, lack of intimacy or equality, and abuse rate next. Divorce rarely happens for lack of love. More often than not, it happens because the members within a relationship feel unhappy, unfulfilled, and they want the freedom to find that fulfillment. Brandan and Kacey have been married for a year now. They love each other, but it’s already getting rocky. Kacey is a pharmacy Technician. It’s a job which she enjoys and finds pleasure in doing. The routine isn’t so monotonous that she goes crazy. Plus, since she works inside a hospital pharmacy she deals with nurses, Pharmacists, and Doctors. There’s a need to build professional relationships but no customer service is necessary. This is preferential to Kacey for a number of reasons and is the primary reason she finds so much joy in her work. Brandan has an engineering degree, but he works construction. One day, about 9 months into their marriage, Brandan comes home after having stormed out of his work. He’d lost his temper with the foreman, because at the end of the day Brandan knows more about soffit and how to install it than anyone else. He walked in huffing and puffing, unable to hold in his frustration, and launched into a tirade about how he’s so much smarter than his foreman, and he should have that job. This isn’t the first time Kacey heard all of this, but she sat silently and patiently while Brandan vented. Two weeks later, Brandan still hasn’t found new work since he has no decent references from any of his many past employers, and Kacey can’t afford the three-bedroom apartment, her car payment, his truck payment, vehicle insurances, and utilities on her own. They move out of their three-bedroom apartment into a one bedroom, one loft room, shop apartment on her mother’s property. It’s livable, but not suitable since Brandan also has three children with his first wife who visit Kacey and Brandan on the weekends. It doesn’t take long until Brandan begins to blame Kacey for everything: Losing visitation with his kids, their inability to maintain and expensive apartment, his inability to keep a job, her inability to work full time and be the housewife, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on. Brandan begins to wish he’d never married Kacey since she’s not good enough, but at the same time he starts to get jealous of Kacey’s friends. Kacey comes from a family of boys. All of her friends are male. She’s even friends with her ex-boyfriends and has rules about this; chief among them is to never regress back into a failed relationship. It’s her gospel. However, Brandan can’t handle it, so he begins to become abusive. He takes her phone, monitors her texts, and even goes so far as to force Kacey to close her Facebook and IG accounts. Ten years later, Kacey and Brandan have been divorced for nine years. They’re both re-married. She’s happily married to Chris, and they’re about to celebrate their 8th anniversary. Brandan is on the brink of his 4th divorce with yet another ex-wife to be claiming physical abuse. What’s Brandan’s issue? He had a great paying job, but it wasn’t high paying, or prestigious enough to impress his family. He had an amazing wife who was happy with life right up until he became insecure and abusive. Brandan’s issues didn’t start with him blowing up and walking out of a job. They existed long before that.

The Grass is Greener

So, we have this inner sense telling us that there’s room for improvement. Some of us translate this to mean that something is broken. Perhaps that was Brandan’s problem. Who really knows? All we do know is that he is fundamentally unhappy and unfulfilled. But this also makes him the ideal candidate to use to illustrate two points here. The first one is that grass is never greener on the other side. Okay… okay... Maybe it is greener, but is it as soft or taste as good? The part of Brandan's story which preceded his marriage to Kacey is that along with every job that he's walked out on, he also walked out on his first wife of 10 years. They had 3 children together, but Brandan dreamed of a life with a younger woman in a nice house, with a nice truck. His first wife always put the needs of their kids before his or hers. This meant that an older house with ample room trumped a glamorous apartment. A minivan trumped the F-150 he wanted. But what Brandan found was that a new, younger wife and his dream apartment came at a high cost. The second wife was younger, and more amenable to his desires, but he had to sacrifice time with his kids. The apartment he and Kacey had was what he’d looked forward to during the divorce, and the truck was the truck he wanted to buy when he was forced to buy his first wife a minivan instead. However, he couldn’t afford either of those things without a second income. After he threw one of his tantrums in her workplace Kacey lost the job that she loved and depended on. She moved two time zones away where she eventually rebuilt everything and met Chris. The second point that Brandan is useful in illustrating is powerlessness. He took zero responsibility for his life, actions, or their consequences. Also, he chose not to learn from his mistakes. In doing this he relinquished his power and became miserable. Unfulfilled living doesn't necessarily equate misery on Brandan's level. Sometimes it just leads to dissatisfaction. We’re programmed from childhood that a good education, coupled with the perfect job, the 2.3 kids, and the 3-bedroom split level are the things that bring us fulfillment. Obviously, it’s not.

Where Fulfillment Comes From

Fulfillment is an inner peace, and it’s a puzzle. The pieces vary and differ from person to person, but usually involve some variation of: Developed Self-Esteem Contentment Self-awareness Joy and Happiness Risk and vulnerability Your significant other matrix Balancing your ego A growth mindset Flexibility It’s very simple. Finding fulfillment in your life starts with knowing who you are and what you want. This will require some level of self-exploration, and self-development. As you know, self-development involves things like working on life skills and honing psychological resilience. Let’s start with what you want and why. What do you want? A bigger house A better car More kids A life of travel and adventure To work from home… There is this idealized viewpoint floating around out there that working from home, being your own boss, or owning your own business or brand is the ideal of freedom. It’s the ultimate end to fulfillment. Afterall, you get to make your own hours, choose your own clients, make all of the decisions, etc. It throws back fond memories and feelings we felt as children and teens when our parents told us ‘no.’ Did you ever have that tantrum? You know the one… You wanted to go to a party or to the movies or to the mall. For whatever reason, your adult guardians or bios told you ‘no.’ They had their reasons, but all you cared about was the denial of freedom for one night away from the house and out living the dream with your friends. You stomped off, slamming a door on your way, screaming whatever, saying that you couldn’t wait to be an adult because then you could make the rules. Well, guess what… Owning your own business, working from home, freelancing, travel writing, or developing and building a brand is a lot like that. Now that you’re an adult, is life the cornucopia of freedom and choice you idealized as a child? Likely not. You can go to the mall with your friends, but then you’d have to spend money you, not your parents, made. You can go out to the bar and stay out past curfew, but you – not your parents- have to get up at 5:00 a.m. to deal with a day of work with a hangover. Working from home, building a business or brand, freelancing, and contracting requires heavy commitment to a lifetime of development, growth, bust, and hard work. Despite widespread belief, those who work for themselves often don’t get to choose their clients. They’re too often busy trying to get enough clients to pay the bills without having to worry about who those clients are morally. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, and it clearly doesn’t jive with society’s definition of what’s supposed to be fair. The point here is that people who want to work from home, be their own boss, become a travel writer, etc., have an underlying motivation. It varies from person to person but can include things like a necessity to be on hand for elderly and aging parents. Most people who work as a freelancer, or are their own boss sat down, at some point, and has asked themselves: “Why did I want this exactly?”

A Case Study

Amanda and Tessa are sisters. Tessa went to beauty school during high school. Amanda went to college and got a degree in psychology. Tessa knew from an early age that she wanted children, so she made a 10-year plan. This 10-year plan not only encompassed her desires and goals, but they also considered likely consequences. Now, not everything went according to plan, but mostly it all worked out. At 18, Tessa moved out of the family home, got her own apartment and her first credit card. By this time, she had also completed beauty school and had a job at her aunt’s salon. She set up a savings account and began courting suitable young men. Any guy who wanted to act like a guy and not like future husband material was quickly extricated from her dating circle. Within five years she’d saved enough money to buy the half share of the salon her aunt offered. Two years later, she married a boy she’d known most of her life and they bought a house together. As it turns out, he’d made the same sort of plans. Within 3 years, they had their first child. Now, Tessa wholly owns the beauty salon where her aunt still maintains a station. She has Sundays and Mondays off as beauticians should do, but she also gets to take every other Saturday and most Fridays off as well thanks largely to her foresight and intrapersonal insight. Tessa and her husband aren’t super rich. But, they’re not in debt, they’re having more children, and she’s fulfilled. Amanda, on the other hand, really didn’t know what she wanted or why. She did know at an early age that she doesn’t want children, and that she may not want to get married. Other than that, her early plans were vague. After completing her degree program, she decided that she’s not really up for being a psychologist. Instead, she travels the U.S. in an RV interviewing campers and full-time RV’ers for her YouTube Channel. As it turns out, there’s a lot of work involved, and it’s time consuming. But, she’s happy. It’s very likely that at some point, Amanda and Tessa sat down with their inner-selves, and had an intrapersonal conversation similar to this: What do you want exactly? I don’t know. To own my own business… Why? So that I can work for myself. Why? Because I have to work. But why not get a conventional job? Because I won’t have the freedom to… Why is the freedom so important? A conventional job will provide steady income which will allow you to build access to a sort of freedom? But I won’t be independent… Both Tessa and Amanda’s internal motivation was independence of some sort for some reason. The answer is going to be different for everybody but finding that deeply hidden internal reason why you want something is key to fulfillment. You can have the fanciest trucks, most glamorous apartment, and the best-looking spouse money can buy. But, unless you identify your underlying motivations, you’re never going to be able to identify what you really want out of life. We’re conditioned that our need for improvement is really a need to fix something that’s broken, or that it’s a need for the right education, degree, spouse, and house, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our Id, that primal desire to improve, is a survival mechanism, nothing more.

The Ego And Superego

Your ego is your primary consciousness. It negotiates the Id’s primal desires for food, water, and shelter with that of your superego and the rules of polite society. Your superego manages your value structure and mores. Your ego is your perception of yourself. It manages how you see yourself, others around you, and how you interact with your immediate environment. When we become emotionally attached to an ideology or belief, we’ve invested our ego into that belief which is why we fight against anything which might challenge our belief systems. We’re indoctrinated from early childhood that acquiring more, achieving more, getting rewarded will lead to happiness. So, when someone comes along and says, “Your happiness is dependent upon your inner self and belief structures.” We tend to sluff it off as hippie talk. Unfortunately, the above statement is the objective truth of this matter. To find fulfillment, you have to start with an exploration of your inner self. Begin with developing an intrapersonal relationship with your inner voice. That voice that drives you to do more, buy more, achieve more, and then puts you down when you’re not good enough is your internalized self. It’s the part of you who you don’t want to share with anyone else because she’s so mean or such a perfectionist. Start there. Develop an intrapersonal relationship with yourself so that you can be alone without being lonely. So that you can work toward an achievement without berating yourself. So that you become capable of showing a little self-love. Once you’ve developed that intrapersonal relationship, ask yourself: What do you want? Why? Why? What’s the underlying desire here? Why? Where is this coming from? How can I create this experience internally first? Why do I want to go out into the world and do something? Consumerism Excessive travel Leaving or sabotaging marriages Start a business or get involved with a venture that will consume most if not all of my time. Is my desire to take a trip really a desire to get away from my home for a while? Why? If so, what can I do to fix it so I don’t want to run away? What is my intuition telling me? What part of this desire or decision gives me anxiety? How can I address that? How can I accept it? How can I accept my limitations and still achieve fulfillment? Not every one of these questions will apply to every situation or desire, but most will. Answer as many as you can as honestly as you can and then continue asking yourself “Why?” like your precocious 4-year-old niece who desires to understand why the sky is blue. Do this until you reach the very root of all roots of your desires. Once you have your inner desires nailed down, work from there. See, most of us spend a great deal of our lives chasing fulfillment because we’ve invested our egos into the idea that the perfect house or spouse will provide fulfillment. Rather, work from your desires like Tessa did and design your plan around them.

The Journey

Understand that while many of us find fulfillment early in life the way Tessa did, we all still continue to maintain it. Tessa may be fulfilled, but she also still has to keep her happiness in mind whenever she makes a decision. Her desires have changed and evolved as she’s grown. When she was a child, she wanted 10 kids of her own. Now she wants three. But she’s looking forward to the day when her kids bring home her first grandchild. Amanda loves traveling, and returning home to visit her sister, niece, and nephew. Eventually, she may desire a static location. For now, though, she’s happy and fulfilled. To maintain that happiness and keep the lifestyle which fulfills her, she has work at it. There are days when she’s tired, but both Amanda and Tessa know that just because they got one of the things that will make them happy, true fulfillment is about the journey you take in getting there. Both are happy and content, but still on a journey none the less. For those of us who are still trying to figure out what it is we want, never mind how to get it, we can find fulfillment and condiment in this part of our journey. This includes things like Surrounding ourselves with good people who make us smile and how live us Holding on to our values without allowing our ego investments to stand in the way of growth and change Accepting the good with the bad Doing the things, we love Finding purpose in everyday life Accepting responsibility for our own lives Remaining open to change and growth Looking for ways and things to learn Facing down fear Listening to our intuitions Giving back to the community and growing to become more self-aware. Doing the things you love is important. It doesn’t matter if that involves your job, a hobby, or even jumping out of a plane or handling snakes every now and again. Find something you truly enjoy, that brings a smile to your face, and do that. It doesn’t matter what others think of you doing something that makes you happy. Remember that you and only you can live your life and experience the consequences of your life’s choices. Sure, those consequences may affect other people so consider them carefully, but in order to find fulfillment you have to take responsibility for your life and actions. This means living your life in a way that brings you joy and happiness. Fear is the killer of fulfillment. Nothing is more paralyzing. It’s fear of the unknown that keeps us in lockstep with the ideals instilled in us as children. “If the McMansion won’t make me happy the way my teachers and parents promised, how will anything else?” A little bit of hesitation and fear is healthy. Afterall, it is a survival instinct. But it can become paralyzing when it’s allowed to guide life decisions. Go after your dreams. Don’t be afraid of them. Spend some time in self-development and self-awareness so that you know what will actually fulfill you, but don’t be afraid of what you find. Finally, understand your intuition and move past your comfort zone. We find comfort in the idea that society has sold us of fulfillment in things and the designs of others, because they’re safe and comfortable. Nothing worth doing involves comfort. Step out of your comfort zone, move past your fears, and find the fulfillment in your life you’ve been looking for. Get A Calm Mind Now! Learn How To Be Stress Free By Going To: The Calm Mind Read the full article

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addcrazy-blog · 8 years ago

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New Post has been published on Add Crazy

New Post has been published on https://addcrazy.com/skylight-tune-theatres-beast-puppet-a-massive-aspect-of-beauty/

Skylight Tune Theatre's 'Beast' puppet a massive aspect of beauty

What’s a theater corporation to do whilst it may locate an 8-foot-tall tenor to play the role of Azor (the Beast) in “beauty and the Beast?” Construct one, of the path.

The Skylight Music Theatre prop store seems like a home for wayward magical creatures nowadays, thanks to a few wildly innovative puppet production for the corporation’s upcoming production of Andre Gregory’s “splendor and the Beast” (“Zemire et Azor”).

“It’s viable, in a fantastical tale, to push the fantastical further if you use puppetry,” James Ortiz, the production’s Obie Award-winning degree director, and scenic clothier, explained in a recent verbal exchange. “Materials, time and creativeness are the handiest obstacles.”

Ortiz and Tune director Shari Rhoads created a new English-language edition of the 1771 opera, which turned into written whilst Mozart turned into about 15. They’ve kept the essence of the story intact, but, in step with Ortiz, removed a few creakier factors of the plot.

“The opera is commonly accomplished with a tenor sporting complete masks till the final moments, whilst he grows to become again into a prince,” Ortiz explained.

Like several fairy stories, “splendor and the Beast” requires the audience to depart some of their idea of fact at door, allowing themselves a suspension of disbelief till the very last curtain falls.

Ortiz referred to setting a fairy story at the level as “growing a heightened universe.” With a historical past in puppetry that dates again to his youth and an Obie Award for puppetry design for “The Woodsman” (a play he also wrote), the idea of using puppets as a number of the characters in “splendor” changed into not much of a jump at all.

however, Ortiz said, to make the idea paintings, the Azor puppet “could be emotional and alive, and be extra dynamic than an actor might be.”

Enter Lisa Schlenker, Skylight residences director.

“The majority listen to the word puppet and they routinely think Kermit and Leave out Piggy, because Henson’s puppets are icons and they’ve been famous for many years,” she stated. “however we understand from ‘Road Q’ that puppets can inform a very person, quite raunchy story, and from Julie Taymor’s paintings [“The Lion King” puppets] that wild, loopy, massive puppets can do mythic, epic storytelling.”

“Epic storytelling is what James can do with this artwork from,” she stated.

Jessica Scott, a New york-based totally visual artist, puppetry director, and instructor, turned into firstly hired because of the puppet challenge supervisor for “splendor.” while she was not able to do the activity for diverse motives, Schlenker stepped into the position.

“She very generously opened her studio to me,” Schlenker said, including that she spent numerous 12-hour days in Scott’s The big apple studio, studying as a lot as she may want to. She constructed a one-1/3-scale model of parts of the beast, and a small model of some Wind Spirit joints at the same time as she changed into there and shipped all of it, in portions, to the Skylight’s prop store.

After returning to Milwaukee, she labored with the prop shop team of workers on building e4028a5c6dae3ad5086501ec6f3534d0 variations of Azor (the beast), the Wind Spirit, as well as a small ship and a small dog.

“This has allowed me to recognize my dream of operating on a huge, completely articulated, title character puppet,” Schlenker stated.

At eight feet tall, profoundly no longer cuddly, and operated onstage by 4 human beings, Azor may want to forestall visitors. Schlenker said he has now not long past neglected while the lawyers whose offices are on a higher ground of the prop save’s constructing have encountered him, or parts of him at the least, on the constructing,Ny’s shared elevator.

Schlenker and the prop save group worked at the puppets for ten days, between the arrival of the pieces froNYand Ortiz’s arrival.

“James [Ortiz] walked into the shop and simply seamlessly lent his hands to the enterprise,” she stated. “He has without a doubt positioned his cash in which his mouth is in terms of the effort and time he has been willing to pour into this assignment.”

Ortiz sings Schlenker’s praises for the determination, artistry, and element she has brought to the puppets, at the same time as she sings his proper again.

She introduced that further to degree-directing the show, Ortiz labored on the model, designed the sets and puppets, did a translation of the tale for staging purposes, and helped Build the puppets.

“It’s so artistically pleasurable to paintings at this level,” Schlenker said. “He’s inspiring.”

Skylights: more Than Only a Window in the Ceiling

At some point of the sixteenth century it become very commonplace for large estate homes to have a conservatory as part of the principle constructing. All of the partitions and ceiling might be built of glass with a purpose to offer sunlight to (on the whole) citrus flora always of day. Possibly the conservatory became the foundation for the idea of a ‘roof lantern’, however what is certainly true is the overabundance of condensation, leaks and warmth loss customary in these structures. Up until the mid-1990’s, the same consequences have been being experienced in houses with Just a simple skylight, let alone a complete massived conservatory.

inside the hobby of bringing absolutely everyone updated on skylight technology, the ones who’ve not seen or been round skylights since the 1980’s are in for a pleasant surprise. gone are the times of domed panels of plexiglass that seem to increase every noise inside a 20 mile radius. Unmarried paned skylights that weep with condensation while the recent water is on for ten seconds are the dinosaurs of the homebuilding enterprise. the ones leaky units that marked the drywall and brought about the precise placement of buckets In the course of the rainy season also are long long past. Having a skylight inside the bed room not way cranking the thermostat to account for warmth loss. Yes, the skylight is without a doubt a distinctive beast than it turned into 30 years ago. Allow’s take a glance.

Placement of a skylight is vital to its universal performance. The overall climate, altitude and type of skylight are of direction essential factors to consider however the guideline of thumb with maximum circumstances dictates the skylight have to identical no greater than five-9% of the floor region. extra than the 9% will suggest the incapacity to manipulate the extent of temperature switch from outside. Less than five% will now not appreciably impact the indoor location in atmosphere, electricity financial savings or offer useful sunlight hours lights. To be clear, a skylight is any horizontal window – that is not something hooked up in a vertical manner which inevitably affords an entire host of different uses and blessings.

Skylights nowadays are now not domed and Single paned. They’re double paned, flat and crafted from thicker more durable glass that has been enormously engineered to be energy efficient. The excessive tech glass is designed specifically to save you warmness loss in wintry weather and maintain cool air in summer time. Plus, some of the most up-to-date features consist of electric venting which in the end rework the skylight into a passive air conditioner. Every other super characteristic is the rain sensor, wherein the primary few drops of rain at the skylight will cause it to close mechanically. What could be greater convenient?

A state of the artwork skylight with All of the bells and whistles isn’t always worth very tons if it wasn’t hooked up properly. The glass itself can be electricity efficient, however what approximately the regions without delay across the skylight? was the unit simply nailed in place and caulked around the rims? If it changed into, that may be a hassle. The cavities surrounding the skylight should be insulated, ideally with a closed cellular spray foam which has the capacity to seek out and fill in each little crack. Spray foam insulation will not most effective close up all gaps and prevent heat loss, it’s also mold resistant just in case there is some eventual moisture penetration.

Almost about power savings, bear in mind the usage of daytime in place of an electrical light – mainly At some stage in the spring and summer time months. In a domestic with many home windows as well as a few strategically located skylights, an electrical mild might not be needed for most of waking hours each day. also, with power efficient skylights well installed and insulated, heating and cooling expenses can be substantially reduced. inside the long time, one may want to even surmise that the mere presence of these high tech functions may want to growth the overall value of the home and make it more applicable to buyers.

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easyfoodnetwork · 5 years ago

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Courtesy of Planters The ingredients and production of Cheez Balls and Dunkaroos are murky, but these snacks retain a nostalgic pull for anyone who ate junk food in the ’90s “It’s one part nostalgia, one part pure love for cheddar-dusted corn snacks,” says Lindsay DiMarcello, a 29-year-old freelance editor and proofreader, of Planters Cheez Balls, the gumball-sized puffed corn snack in a blue canister. “I remember being very small and sitting under a coffee table in my living room that was right next to a heater vent, and eating a whole can.” In 2006, Planters discontinued the snack, and in 2014, DiMarcello published a petition on Change.org called “Bring back Planters Cheez Balls and P.B. Crisps!” It received 818 signatures, a reasonably small response. One day, during the summer of 2018, she opened the front door of her home in Oaks, Pennsylvania, to a camera crew recording her. She had nearly forgotten about the petition by then, but when she saw a peanut-shaped trailer parked in her driveway and someone in a full-body Mr. Peanut costume, she figured it out: Planters, the nut brand owned by the Kraft Heinz food conglomerate, was bringing back the snack. The Planters marketing team had gotten in touch with her boyfriend, who helped plan the surprise visit to coincide with the relaunch. “I still desperately miss P.B. Crisps. It sucks that didn’t happen,” says DiMarcello. “There is a bit of a nostalgic halo to the brand,” says Samantha Hess, brand manager at Kraft Heinz; compared to other bright orange cheese powder-dusted corn puffs on the market, she believes Cheez Balls excels. Around since the late 1970s, the product was most popular in the ’80s and ’90s, she explains, and that’s why Kraft Heinz marketed the relaunch as a throwback to the ’90s. It was shelved in the mid-2000s as part of an effort by the company to refocus on its core products: nuts. The look and taste of the snack have been carefully preserved to assure customers that it’s the same product they remember. The only noticeable difference is a burst on the canister that reads: “It’s Back.” “You’re seeing products that pretend to be healthy and others that have no pretense at all — it’s just pure junk food.” Cheez Balls are not the only ’90s snack food to reappear. The Coca-Cola Company reintroduced its discontinued soda Surge in 2014, also employing a ’90s nostalgia marketing strategy. General Mills recently announced Dunkaroos will return this year, writing on its blog, “’90s kids now have a new reason to rejoice.” The kangaroo-shaped cookies in a plastic tray with a pool of frosting for dipping, which were available in the U.S. from 1990 to 2012, had received shout-outs from Kim Kardashian West, Chrissy Teigen, and Lilly Singh. With today’s ’90s kids in their late 20s and 30s, big food makers are tapping into deep reserves of childhood brand recognition for their “new” items. “It costs a lot of money to introduce and market new products, so you see a lot of repackaging and re-introductions of old stuff that was successful,” says Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, which explores the ways that big food companies have engineered snack foods to be addictive. But, like Bill and Ted thrust into another era, many totally, righteously ’90s snacks are an odd fit for a consumer base that increasingly demands more healthful and wholesome foods. Moss describes a divergence in thinking among the biggest food companies that took place around 2017. Confronted with declining sales, as more people became concerned with what they were eating, some packaged food companies resolved to sell more good-for-you products, or at least the illusion of that. “But then you saw another part of the industry that was like, screw that, there’s always going to be a few million people who are just in it for the craving and the fix,” says Moss. These companies chose to double down on junk food. “That’s why you’re seeing products that pretend to be healthy and others that have no pretense at all — it’s just pure junk food.” Today, though, these cheap-calorie snacks sit beside plenty of alternatives that tout their healthful virtues. Could nostalgia give them an edge? Troubled since almost the day the two food giants merged in 2015, Kraft Heinz appears to be gambling on that approach with its Cheez Balls comeback campaign. And General Mills, a conglomerate whose biggest business, breakfast cereals, is in the midst of a long and well-publicized sales decline, might be testing a parachute with its Dunkaroos revival. Forget the healthful hyperbole. Forget the barnyard imagery and “Harvest Cheddar” flavor names, even. This time, going back in time to a simpler place means forgetting everything you ever learned about high-fructose corn syrup. “One of the addictive properties of a cheese puff is when you put it in your mouth and press your tongue onto the roof of your mouth, the puff dissolves because it gets half of its calories from fat,” says Moss. In food manufacturing, this phenomenon is called “vanishing caloric density”: the notion that when a food is so light that it requires little chewing, the brain doesn’t signal that you are overeating. Then there’s “dynamic contrast” — essentially, exciting variations in textures and colors, as with Oreo cookies or Dunkaroos. This, says Moss, is just how humans are wired: “The brain loves information for information’s sake, so the more ways you can excite the brain, the better.” According to some studies, Moss says, people — like animals — are attracted to bright colors when shopping for food; this is something that the food industry discovered way back in the 1950s and ’60s. “Which is why the grocery store, when you walk in, you’re just faced with neon colors,” he says. “If you look at the space these products take up in a supermarket, it’s evident they’ve got a hold on our brains,” says Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect. Much of the appeal of junk food items comes from the natural and artificial flavorings added to them. In the flavor labs Schatzker has visited, scientists work to reproduce the chemical compounds in certain real foods to add to food products. The problem with engineering brilliant flavors, he says, is creating an addictive snack out of a morsel that you wouldn’t otherwise want or need to eat much of. Like extruded cornmeal. “They all kind of run on the same formula, which is a processed carb with flavor powder on it,” says Schatzker of cheese-coated corn-based snacks. “It’s hard to stop eating them because they’re engineered to be continued to be eaten.” Despite the scientific precision of the nutritional information printed on food packaging, it can be almost impossible to understand what, exactly, many food products are. Or to visualize how they’re made. And few foods are less transparent than Cheez Balls and Dunkaroos; unlike potato chips, a cheese ball represents nothing organic, and with their uniform, molded shapes and plentiful packaging, Dunkaroos are emphatically not just-like-homemade. They’re a throwback to a time before artisanal, small-batch, and all-natural messaging would dominate labels, and meet-the-maker videos flourished. Kraft Heinz declined to describe how Cheez Balls are made, and few people seem to wonder about their production. But it turns out that cheese curls, puffs, balls, and doodles were invented around 1939 by an animal feed manufacturer in Wisconsin, as Ernie Smith explored for Atlas Obscura. When a grinder jammed, an employee ran some wet corn through the machinery and discovered that it puffed up while exiting the grinder. He seasoned the corn, and the resulting snack was eventually called Korn Kurls. According to the University of Wisconsin, employees of the animal feed company continued to experiment with frying techniques and flavorings, like cheese powder. “It’s hard to stop eating them because they’re engineered to be continued to be eaten.” Extruded cornmeal-based snacks are everywhere now. And they’re not just snacks; biodegradable packing peanuts, made from cornstarch or other edible, food-based starches, are created using the same kind of process with high-heat extruders. A representative for Puffy Stuff, a biodegradable packing peanut company, told me on the phone that they’re entirely edible. “We joke around and we eat them,” she said. I’ll admit to letting one or two of these things dissolve in my mouth, too. And if you break apart a cornstarch-based packing peanut and smell the inside, it will remind you of a cheese curl. “In the ’80s and ’90s there was an explosion of processed food,” says Kristin Lawless, a nutritionist and author of Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture. Behind the shift in supermarket shelves was a significant change in industrial farming. Around this time, Monsanto, founded as a chemical company, began stepping up its efforts in biotechnology, producing corn and soy along with pesticides to control them. Corn and soy, Lawless explains, “are the backbone ingredients of all processed foods.” Just as this year’s relaunch of Planters Cheez Balls required elaborate marketing efforts, these products were heavily advertised to their target audience. As processed corn- and soy-based products proliferated in the ’90s, Saturday morning cartoons were bookended by commercials for a wacky range of foods marketed to children — like bouncing cartoon kangaroo-shaped cookies. And the boom in processed food followed an increase in advertising focused on African-American consumers during the ’70s. “With the rise of more ethnic market research firms and advertising agencies, the big companies, like Quaker Oats and General Mills, really concentrated on promoting the use of convenience foods for traditional, black cuisine and encouraging the consumption of packaged foods,” says Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Because African Americans tend to have less access to health care and fewer choices in the marketplace for quality groceries, on top of the stresses caused by racism, says Chatelain, they’ve been particularly impacted by this kind of eating. Before the 2000s, most people had never heard of GMOs. Americans had no way of knowing whether they were eating trans fats, let alone that they were bad for you and would eventually be banned. Eric Schlosser hadn’t written Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan hadn’t imbued omnivores with a best-selling dilemma. Millennials are definitely not the first generation with highly processed comfort foods — boomers have that unique honor. But during the ’90s, the processed food industry was on a serious modified food starch high. “I’m tasting the Dunkaroo in my mind and it is so sweet and texturally very satisfying, and it just brings me back to the playground,” says Eve Turow Paul, a consultant and author of the upcoming book Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning. She sees the reboots of Dunkaroos and Cheez Balls as a way of tapping into a shared memory or identity, and finding community around that. Given the performative aspect of tweeting about Dunkaroos or “liking” a Facebook group calling for the return of a discontinued snack, a nostalgic food can take on an almost meme-like quality. It’s less about making informed food choices than indulging in an escapist pleasure. “You are essentially excusing yourself from your general adult worries in life,” she says. But memes aren’t necessarily appetizing. “To be honest, if I saw those in a store, I would probably point them out to my husband and be like, ‘Oh my god, remember Dunkaroos?’” Turow Paul says. “But I probably wouldn’t buy them.” Nostalgia is a formidable, and some might say toxic, force that defines a large chunk of the U.S. restaurant industry, so it’s no surprise that packaged goods manufacturers are using this theme to sell their products, too. Perhaps the most famous food associated with nostalgia is the madeleine recalled in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. This singular, shell-shaped tea biscuit spurs a flurry of memories for the narrator. If, as the novel implies, everyone has their own madeleine memories — locked deep in the subconscious and accessible only with a certain key — perhaps we all have one food that succeeds above all others in triggering our memories. And maybe we should indulge in it from time to time, Red 40 and all. Lindsay DiMarcello, who started the Cheez Balls petition, still loves dipping them in chocolate milkshakes, a habit she picked up as a kid. A dynamic contrast if there ever was, she says, the salty cheddar dust paired with sweet, cold chocolate ice cream is deliciously balanced. But, she adds, “This also works great with Herr’s Cheese Curls.” Cathy Erway is the author of The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3cZGiP0

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