Sugar Shoop

Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Girls, what's my weakness?

SIMPLE CARBOHYDRATES! Okay then. I’m sorry, I just love Salt ‘n’ Suga. 'N' wheat. 'N' high fructose corn syrup.

I cannot resist a cookie or a Twizzler or a Lindt truffle. I need to keep these things out of my house. I refuse to categorically reject any food (except donuts, those are completely unsatisfying to me and I feel like I need to eat 4 to feel satisfied so I am avoiding them post-pregnancy).

So I won’t say to myself, “I will never eat sugar again.” I know only one person in real life who as actually done that, and she is awesome, but I’m not her. I can’t give things up forever. What I can do is keep sweets out of my house. On maternity leave, they were so much easier to pop in my mouth with a babe in one arm than, say, preparing a salad. But then I would continue eating candy and didn't compensate by eating more healthfully on other days, or by exercising. Now that I need to model good habits for the kiddo, and get back to fighting weight (aka non-obesity), I can’t run to the grocery or drugstore in the middle of the afternoon to fulfill a Bassett’s Allsort craving as I did during pregnancy.

And I can strive to try to eat sweets when and only when there is something delicious and unusual afoot. For example, a night out for ice cream with friends, or my mother’s special coginettes at Christmas. The sweet surprise of the food truck cupcake arriving in our neighborhood. The treat of Mexican cookies at a Cinco de Mayo parties. Not daily binging at my apartment.Moral of the story? I can't be perfect. But. Cookies are a sometimes food, y’all.

*Apologies for the lyrics bastardization go out to the incredible Salt 'n' Pepa, who I have on 100% good authority read this blog every morning before breakfast. I LOVE YOU LADIES and I hope you understand.

Bureaucracy and Cupcakes

I love food trucks. So I started following my faves on twitter. The day I started following Buttercream, a popular and delicious cupcake truck, owner Kate Carrara's followers were alerted to a trying situation for the dessert-peddler: the cops and the City's Department of Licensing and Inspection, who had given Carrara a warning about not being able to vend in a particular spot a few weeks prior, drove her truck away from said spot in her presence. She paid $200 to retrieve the truck.

What?

It's the kind of thing that, if anyone besides cops had done it, would basically be robbery and grand theft auto.

Granted, Carrara should have made sure she was in the right place. But the bigger issue, she says, is knowing where she is allowed to vend. The city's labyrinthine maps and codes do not make this at all clear to a lay person/small business owner/anyone. In a functioning city, a permitted vendor should be able to call up the proper department, name a spot, and be told definitively whether one can vend there or not.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia has not historically been the best example of transparent city government in our great nation. Among the comments in the Inquirer story linked above: "She should have just paid off the L&I inspector...like everyone else does" - ouch. But this city, including L&I, seems to suffer continuously from stories of corruption and incompetence.

We could say that Carrara is planting this story as a stunt, a campaign to raise her business' profile and drum up sympathy, and, therefore, publicity. But even if she is, it's working for me. This is a woman, a small business owner, who already has a cadre of followers in a city that is notorious for bad government. Even if she's overselling the story, the mere facts are enough to make me feel that the city is more concerned about padding its coffers than helping citizens sustain their livelihoods and making Philadelphia a nice place to live.

Team Buttercream.