By PAUL MCELROY

DRIFTWOOD COLUMNIST

I do worry about the Americans. I worried about them long before Trump emerged from under his rock because I have watched American television and couldn’t escape the advertisements for medicines without either having a finger hovering over the mute button or my head exploding.

The United States is either a nation of the permanently unwell or of chronic hypochondriacs, which is a bit ironic in a country where having an ingrowing toenail can bankrupt you.

Equally, it is puzzling that a nation whose health tsar seems to embody all the wholesome attributes of Simon the Leper should be so preoccupied with its own wellbeing. Or maybe it’s because of their cadaverous health secretary that they have become more fearful of any potential malady.

On CNN and MSNBC (or MSNow, as it prefers to be called these days, presumably as a result of a new CEO who, after doing some hard thinking, had an idea), every four advertisements in five is for some miracle cure, invariably of an ailment I’ve never heard of and most certainly don’t want. Others are more prosaic but are still not a suitable topic for polite conversation, especially around the dinner table.

There is, for instance, the young woman working in her garden while brazenly extolling the virtues of a particular laxative but, if she’ll excuse me for saying so, however winsome she might be I have absolutely zero interest in her bowels, regular or otherwise! And that also goes for the ladies with wind and troublesome bladders. I’m sure it’s desperately uncomfortable, but I’d just as soon they kept it to themselves.

Worse still are the pills and nostrums, advertised this time by young women in various degrees of undress, aimed at chaps who are having problems in the bedroom department. Bowels and bladders are bad enough, but a gentleman’s tackle is really below the belt.

But it’s the more serious maladies that I worry about, most of which I’d never heard of but now live in fear of getting. American shingles, for instance. I’d heard of shingles, of course, and have even been inoculated against it, but I had no idea, according to the MSNow ads that pop up about every 15 seconds, that in the U.S. shingles presents itself as a fiery pox that will burn through your shirt unless you take the precaution of immunizing yourself. Presumably the American variety is significantly more potent than our own, although both are best avoided.

And American heartburn! Mortifying. Show the slightest sign of feeling slightly queasy after another giant dinner of whatever it is you’ve just hoovered up and the restaurant staff will take to the stage and sing about it in gruesome detail.

Then there are the quack potions for restoring your memory. Never mind that none of them have been proven to work for an ordinarily healthy person who merely occasionally misplaces their car keys — or their car. Even the tiny print at the bottom of the screen points out that these particular nostrums are probably of no use to man nor beast and the folk they’ve quite obviously paid to advertise them are best ignored. And then forgotten.

The small print is always terrifying. For a regular arthritis pill: “Serious infections, including tuberculosis and fungal infections, have occurred, sometimes leading to hospitalization or death. Tell your doctor if you have fever, cough, weight loss or fatigue.” Death!? Tuberculosis!? And they always come over the cheery part which offers instant relief from shortness of breath and a probable first place in the Vancouver marathon.

At least the American drugs, unlike the nation itself today, are democratic. There’s pretty much something for everyone, from the fat to the emaciated, blocked noses to the running sores, the depressed and the hyperactive. There is even a drug for a guy who appears to have a finger with a mind of its own and another for some old fellah, a doctor no less, who is terrified of stairs because he has pins and needles in his feet. Killer pins and needles, eh? Who knew.

The whole Big Pharma message is slightly biblical: “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.” Except of course, this is the United States, where nothing is free and the halt and the lame will have paid an arm and a leg to walk again.

But it’s the dental ads that keep me awake at night, those All-American teeth that glow in the dark, so white, so perfect they can be seen from space; far too good to be wasted on mere chewing. They never show the “before” pictures of the poor souls whose lives have been blighted by a mouthful of teeth that would shame Shrek, but the remedy is almost as shocking: wide, rictus grins displaying teeth just too perfect to be taken seriously.

And here’s an interesting fact. Despite having the world’s most aesthetically appealing teeth, America’s actual dental health comes way down the World Health Organization league of healthy choppers. The Scandinavians, needless to say, lead the world and even the Brits, who have long been scorned for having teeth best hidden behind a bushy moustache, are much healthier, mouthwise, than the luminescent Yanks. Europe is more into drilling and filling than buffing, while it’s likely most Americans can’t afford decent teeth unless they whittle them themselves.

Neither, I assume, can many of them afford these medicines which might just make their lives more bearable.

paulmcelroy@shaw.ca

Everybody knows that living on an island is, by definition, a political act. Whether divided as north versus south, newcomer versus old-timer, working-class family versus empty nest retiree, or aggressive online entrepreneur versus the laid-back, back-to-the-lander, there’s always a line forming that will divide islanders into different camps.

Nowhere is this more apparent and evident than when you look at the shelves attached to the door or doors of your refrigerator.

What? Excuse me? Did I just say something about refrigerator door shelves? Yes, you heard me right.

Those fridge door shelves are more than just storage space for jars, packages, containers and other foods that don’t efficiently use up room in the main compartments of your refrigerator. No, they actually mark out a virtual pecking order of gourmet delicacies and specialty items that you long ago forgot you had purchased for an obscene percentage of your grocery budget. 

Take, for example, that squat glass jar of Conimex Sambal Oelek Vers Gemalen Chilipepers that has made its way all the way to the narrow top shelf of the door. The ingredients on the label have faded so badly that they are no longer legible. The expiry date is etched on the glass with hieroglyphics and it is impossible to know for certain whether the “best before” year date is BC or AD. To be sure, the Sambai Oelek must have been a key ingredient in an exotic recipe of some Paleolithic drawing chiseled onto a cave wall, but those days disappeared about the same time as the latest eruption of Mount Sambai.

Alongside the jar of Sambai Oelek, and probably just as mysterious in origin, sits a short canister of organic Maison Orphee Yellow Mustard with Turmeric (or, as they say in Paree, “Moutarde Jaune au Curcuma”) that had been verified as Non GMO even though it was probably processed back when genetic modification meant something you did to your pet gerbil when your parents weren’t home.

You may not believe this, but the position of the assorted food containers on the door shelves is by all accounts a contest of high status/low status. As time goes by, they work their way down lower on the door as they get older and it becomes harder and harder to remember why you bought them in the first place. By the time they make it down to the bottom shelf, it’s not worth the effort to bend over low enough to be able to identify which mystery food you are dealing with. In a sense, the bottom shelf of the fridge door is kind of a purgatory for specialty food items. When they reach this point in their nutritional descent, they can be easily hoodwinked into trusting that they are still of some culinary use. They may still believe that they have entered a Witness Protection Program portal for out of date condiments where they will be given new labels and identities. Little do they realize that, because they can’t get any lower on the fridge door, the next stop for that tube of Giovanni’s Gluten Free Anchovy Paste is the compost bin.

Somewhere tucked in the corner of one of your fridge door shelves is your collection of probiotic capsules and tablets. Maybe you’ve got the Double Strength Acidophilus and Bifidus with 10 billion active cells. Or perhaps you’ve stashed some Acidophilus Ultra with 11 billion cells for IBS support and restoration of intestinal balance. Either way, you know you will never open either probiotic in fear of unleashing billions of intestinal bacteria on this fragile earth.

A good way to help you remember where you have placed your precious little brown bottle of Blue Ice Fermented Cod Liver Oil Non-Gelatin caps is to regularly take photos with your camera phone of all the items inhabiting every shelf of your refrigerator door. We call these “shelfies,” and they can really cut down the time it takes to find that Favuzzi “The Artisan’s Way” Green Olive Tapenade before you decide it’s too dangerous to even try to pry open the canning lid. These photos may also help you to locate that collection of restaurant pads of butter and ketchup packages that you were sure you had placed somewhere safe in case of an emergency.

You can never really know what goes on inside your fridge once the door is closed. Just like the 1970s San Francisco comedy group, Firesign Theatre, spoofed in an ad when they described the finer selling points of a refrigerator, “Close the door and the light stays on,” all kinds of nefarious activities may be transpiring on the inside with most of the insidious actions occurring right there on the fridge door shelves. It is quite possible that insults are being hurled from one shelf to another and even between products occupying the same shelf. 

Most guilty of this demeaning behaviour and “trash talking” are the various mustards, which are always looking to increase their condiment status. As a result, the Dijon mustard spends much of its shelf life dissing the Heinz yellow mustard, but is itself ridiculed by the French’s Organic Classic Yellow Prepared Mustard. At the very top of the mustard food chain, and thereby occupying the top shelf, is that tiny little imported glass jar of brown speckled Edmond Fallot Moutarde au cassis de Dijon, which, even when it was still full, contained only enough mustard to barely flavour a single Reuben sandwich. Of course, none of these mustard containers were stored upside down on their shelves, and consequently when squeezed or shaken, produce only a thin runny liquid while a concrete-hard lump of the solidified substance remains stuck to the bottom of the jar or bottle.

Nobody asked me, but living on an island can feel an awful lot like being squeezed onto one of the narrow shelves of the refrigerator door. You may not know who or what you are. No one may know or care where to find you. You may not get along with your neighbours or they might not want to get along with you. You may be as compatible as Dennis’ Original Horseradish is with Uncle Luke’s Organic Maple Syrup. Nevertheless, you can still make it work. Just remember that just because the door is closed, the light may still be on.

There are many levers local governments can pull to nudge human behaviour.

But the ones grabbed most eagerly — and admittedly effectively — have always been any that target our pocketbooks. The Capital Regional District (CRD) reached for those once it became clear the region’s only landfill was filling up faster than it could raise money to expand it. 

As part of a multi-year ongoing increase scheme, the CRD raised Hartland Landfill tipping fees again to $160 per tonne for general refuse; through its regulation bylaw, fines for some kinds of prohibited trash can now be as high as $2,000.

It’s all done in hopes thrifty customers will take the hint, perhaps reduce their consumption but certainly take advantage of low- to no-cost recycling and organics drop-off options. 

And it may be working. We’ve seen how popular island recycling depots are, and it seems as if everyone is growing something each summer thanks to all the backyard composting that’s done.

But for institutional customers, it’s another matter. There’s no free ride on Salt Spring for a business, park, clinic or school that’s producing recyclable or compostable waste; they either pay someone to sort their trash and someone else to take it away, or pay someone to take it all and sort it elsewhere. Staffing costs make that latter choice pretty attractive, which we imagine leaves haulers in a similar situation later: pay someone to sort, or risk penalty costs at the landfill.

Or, possibly, find somewhere cheaper to take it all. The Cowichan Valley Regional District accepts trash it sends to landfills in Washington State for a relative bargain of 33 cents per kilogram.

Notably, for residential trash it’s an unsettled matter as to whether raising tipping fees causes more households to dump illegally; in rural settings, the baseline of random bags found at the end of quiet roads is unmeasured, and it’s hard to tell who’s burying what in their backyards.

But marketplace forces are far more predictable. If the cost of something goes up, every operation will search for a lower cost supplier. Business is business. 

It may not be the environment-conscious plan we’d hope for. But if the CRD’s goal is simply to divert island trash to anywhere but Hartland, its strategy may be working.