Now with ginseng!

Now, I roll my eyes a lot, but recent trips to the convenience store near my office have me rolling them far back into my head. I've long been keeping track of the recent onslaught of green tea related beverages and energy drinks.

The whole whack of green tea beverages is related to the fact that people now think green tea is good for you because it contains anti-oxidants. I'm convinced that anti-oxidants are like feng shui in that people believe in them, but only about 45 people can tell you the principles and what they actually do.

And green tea probably is good for you, but not when it's loaded up with all the crud that these manufacturers are putting in these bottled drinks.

Anyway, soft drink manufacturers are losing sales because people have reduced their consumption of pop in recent years since they have figured out that drinking pop is the nutritional equivalent of watching "Full House." As a result, the manufacturers are now marketing all these sugared green tea "energy" beverages to try to recapture a market.

Some of the energy beverages really get to me. I recently saw an ad for a new kind of Pepsi Max, a new soft drink that features Pepsi, Ginseng and Green Tea, designed to give you energy. What? The whole thing is so ridiculous to me. Is our world so depraved that we have to rely on drinks for energy? What ever happened to sleep, exercise and eating properly?

Oh, yeah. Right.

I should also add that if you get the urge to go to Mac's for a slushy, do not drink the citrus mint flavour. I only tried a small sip of it, but it tastes like a dental fluoride treatment. I don't think it's going to fly.

Moving to the country....

I smell like campfire. I just went to visit a couple who is starting this area's first CSA farm. CSAs do not seem to be particularly common in Canada. I googled them and most of them seem to be found in Ontario or Quebec, with a smattering in BC. There is also one near Calgary and one near Edmonton.

CSA stands for community supported agriculture. Members of a CSA farm buy shares, and each week they receive a box of harvest during the growing season. They can also visit the farm where their produce is grown, help with the harvest and help out on the farm if they like. It's a good way to keep money in a community, support small farms and sustainable agriculture. Everyone wins!

Anyway, this particular farm was out in the boonies. I haven't written a lot about driving to find farms, but sometimes finding farms is an adventure in itself. I generally have to get directions and sometimes look people up on our county map. The county maps give range roads and secondary highways, and I sometimes have to use these coordinates to help locate myself. It also helps if farmers are good at giving directions. Some of them give very detailed directions, full of local landmarks, which make it easy for me to find them. In other cases, I have missed out a step on the directions or have actually received directions like, "Drive past the dip in the road."

I never, ever, ever leave the city without my cell phone. I've driven into people's yards to look up phone numbers in the phone book, or to ask them if they know where a certain person lives. Last year I was looking for a "Dave Schmidt" and actually ended up being directed to the farm of another Dave Schmidt in the area.

Anyway, I found the farm today after an hour of being lost. The couple running it gave me a tour of their greenhouse, which is heated by a wood stove. They live in a trailer for part of the year and spend the rest of the year on Vancouver island. They made me some coffee brewed from dandelions, which I did not enjoy at all.