Category Archives: Product review

Smug Cleaning Products Review and Workout

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Method Ecover Seventh Generation cleaning productsSmug Scout is not a natural born housekeeper. In fact, to put it more accurately, she combines an innate disinclination and indifference with a spectacular level of incompetence. She is tempted to pay someone to clean her apartment, but because she prefers to spend her money on food, drinks, vacations, and things to wear, and because her apartment is only a cell-like 650 square feet, she feels she should be able to handle this task on her own.

So handle it she does, albeit rarely and poorly. This morning, however, she could not avoid it because she is having company this afternoon, and with all the (fucking) sun shining in, any dirty spots would be glaringly illuminated. Thus, she got to work using the Smug environmentally friendly products in the above photo.

This post is not really a review of those products, however, nor is it a comparison of them. Why not? Method, Ecover, Seventh Generation, whatever. They are all sensitive to animals and the planet, they are all free of noxious chemicals, they all smell pretty good, they are all available for a high price at Whole Foods, and they are all simply dreadful as cleaning agents. That is as much as she cares to review them because the real issue is the second part of the post’s title: workout. Using these products means actively using all the muscles in your arms and legs. It is not like those TV commercials for environmentally ruinous cleaning products that show a smiling Stepford wife spraying the product on some unidentifiable filth and then effortlessly wiping it away in one smooth gesture. Smug Scout is not sure those products are that miraculous, but she knows they do not involve so many “reps” of such grueling, laborious scrubbing. For example, a small red wine stain on the kitchen floor does not simply come off with a quick spritz of Seventh Generation “Green Mandarin and Leaf All-Purpose Cleaner.” As Smug Scout is on her hands and knees violently rubbing her biodegradable European dish towel over the stain, she vaguely wonders how the hell unripe mandarins and random leaves became qualified to work as cleaning products. She believes unripe mandarins and random leaves need to go back to their day job.

Smug Scout will not be doing such intensely athletic cleaning again for quite some time. Furthermore, she believes she needs to drink more white wine, so if she clumsily splashes a drop on the floor, no one will see it. This is the only kind of cleaning solution at which Smug Scout excels.

Smug, Preachy, Semi-literate Granola

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As we well know, some Smug products subtly reveal their Smugness. Others display it prominently. Now Smug Scout knows there is a third possibility: strident evangelism. What is this craziness?

It all started when Smug Scout was on the prowl in the Silver Lake Cheese Shop, where she of course encountered a breathtakingly Smug local product: Good Habit Homemade Granola from Thousand Oaks, California, a suburb north of L.A. On the surface, this granola looked like your usual Smug granola: local, homemade, slickly packaged, and appropriately overpriced at $10. As she read the package, she gradually realized that she was dealing with the Joel Osteen of granola.

First sermon: “Our Homemade Granola is made by hand, and loaded with almonds, seeds, and dried fruit. Try it sprinkled on thick yogurt, accompanied by fresh berries, or just eat it on it’s own as a snack.”

Well, other than the disgracefully misplaced comma and apostrophe, Smug Scout can live with this one.  She already eats Bircher Müsli every day, so consider her converted.

Second sermon: “Not all habits have to be bad. You can indulge in something sinfully delicious, that is also good for you!”

Well, other than the disgracefully misplaced comma, Smug Scout is just baffled by this one. She does not know what “sin” something as virtuous as local, vegan, gluten-free granola could possibly be committing. At worst this is like a nun who gets overexcited by her measly sip of communion wine. Frankly, when Smug Scout thinks of “sinfully delicious,” she imagines non-Smug indulgences, such as New York pizza from Totonno’s in Coney Island or deep dish pizza from Pequod’s in Chicago, of course washed down with many chalices of non-communion wine. Smug granola is much more likely to be part of a sober post-gorging penance.

Third sermon: “Other GOOD HABIT’s…….”

  • “Enjoying everything in moderation”
  • “Sharing a meal with friends and family”
  • “Planting a garden (even a small one)”
  • “Cooking with someone you love”
  • “Supporting your local farmers”

Well, Smug Scout has had just about enough of the excessive punctuating and mawkish sermonizing. Now she has her own set of demands for “Good Habit.” She doubts the company will want to read this list, but she wanted to have one ready just in case.

  • Give Smug Scout a house. How can you, you proselytizing granola, expect her to have a garden–“even a small one”–when she lives in an apartment barely bigger than a medieval monk’s cell?
  • Give Smug Scout a big kitchen in that house. Just so you know, she prefers European appliances and reclaimed wood for all surfaces. She would not reject Simon Pearce handblown glassware from Vermont.
  • For that matter, get Smug Scout a gardener. Smug Scout likes the idea of growing unheard of heirloom vegetable varietals, but she is turned off by the yucky reality of kneeling in dirt, burning up in the sun, and most of all wearing Crocs.
  • For God’s sake, learn how to punctuate.
Smug Scout is starting to wonder if she would prefer a granola called Bad Habit. At least it would leave her alone.

Smug Yogurt Fail

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Smug Scout was recently shopping at her favorite Smug amusement park, one of her six local Whole Foods stores, when she saw a Smug product she first discovered in San Francisco: Straus Family Creamery European Style Organic Plain Lowfat Yogurt. Products with such wordy gobbledygook names are automatically Smug, but the fact that this is the “creamery” (Sonoma County does not have plebeian dairies) used by Bi-Rite for its ice cream is all Smug Scout needs to know (see Smug Scout’s post on Bi-Rite Market and Creamery, an epicenter within an epicenter within THE epicenter) . The container provides further information about this yogurt’s sterling Smug credentials:

  • “European Style” tells us that Straus (please pronounce with a German accent) rejects “American Style,” which means sour and flavorless.
  • The container sports hand-drawn looking pictures of cows and grass and spoons along with faux handwritten text.
  • The back of the container boasts “organic, local, & sustainable from field to spoon” which suggests pampered vegan cows, Marxist farmers and no evil corporate middlemen.
  • The yogurt is made in what Smug Scout believes to be a dazzlingly artisanal way: “incubated” in stainless steel vats, of course in small batches that take “over ten hours to make.” Wow. It is not made; it is born.

So clearly this yogurt passes Smug muster, and Smug Scout could end her post here were it not for the fact that this yogurt is driving her insane. As you should already know, Smug Scout eats yogurt every day with granola and local, organic fruit. When she first opened her Straus Family Creamery European Style Organic Plain Lowfat Yogurt, she was shocked by how runny it was. She did not need a spoon. She just poured it into her reusable plastic Bircher Müsli container. Then she tasted it. It did not taste either European or European style. It tasted like sour mass market American yogurt. Smug Scout has eaten a lot of yogurt, if not yoghurt, in Europe, and she has never felt that “American Style” sour shock in her mouth.

To make matters more irritating, Smug Scout cannot seem to use up this runny, sour non-European style yogurt. After over a week of non-European tasting Bircher Müsli, she was shocked to see how much was left in this gargantuan 32 ounce container. It seems like a bottomless container. It seems like every time Smug Scout eats some, the remaining quantity doubles. It is a yogurt version of that ancient Greek monster called the Hydra. Smug Scout will not throw it out either, because she refuses to waste things. She does not even dispose of moldy cheese. She grates off the outer layer and rather than throwing out those unappetizing blue shavings, she simply adds them to some Smug version of macaroni and cheese (she prefers the German version, Käsespätzle) and calls it “sharp.”

Last night, in an attempt to get closer to the bottom of this bottomless yogurt container, Smug Scout prepared an extremely spicy Indian dish (Tofu Vindaloo with local, seasonal, organic vegetables, if you must know) just so that she would need a large portion of raita. She even threw in multiple jalapeños with all of their seeds to make her mouth so inflamed that she would not care about sour, runny, or fraudulent “European Style” yogurt.

But this morning Smug Scout became quite cross when she saw how much yogurt is still left. She supposes she will dump it in the blender with some local, organic fruit. She supposes that will make approximately ten smoothies.

Next time she will get Fage again. She will gladly pay the extra three dollars. Anyway, she probably gets “billions of beneficial bacteria” in all the moldy cheese she eats.

Smug Juice from Silver Lake

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Every so often Smug Scout sees a product that is so Smug that it all but takes her breath away. This happened to her yesterday in Silver Lake where she went to observe the self-righteously Smug local color. She was waiting on a line that barely crawled forward (all the better to attract hype-seeking hipsters) at a Smug coffee source called Intelligentsia, when she spotted a hand-stencilled sign advertising “Cold Pressed Fresh Raw Juice Made by the Juice Maids 16OZ $9.50.” Underneath the sign was some yellow-green liquid in a Mason jar that had a tiny label attached to a piece of string; the string was hand-tied in a jaunty little bow. The label read “Spirit in the Sky” and listed the ingredients: “cantaloupe, orange, basil, lemon ♥.”

Obviously every aspect of the product naming, advertising, pricing, packaging, and appearance signals Smug.  Smug Scout happily shelled out ten bucks.  Smug Scout could just drink her cute Silver Lake spiritual juice and stop right there.  Too bad Smug Scout has a few questions.

  1. Why are the makers called Juice Maids? Were they formerly milkmaids who went vegan?  Are there eight of them like in “The Twelve Days of Christmas”? Smug Scout is amused by the idea of eight virginal women cold pressing her fresh raw juice. That is a large crowd surrounding a Mason jar. She wonders if they ever fight.
  2. Smug Scout understands that cold-pressing is important because pacifists do not want their gentle fruit and vegetables cut and ground by some savage blade, but why did they have to add “fresh raw”? Might we have otherwise expected the fruit to be rotten, moldy, buggy, and disgusting? Might we have otherwise expected the fruit to be cooked? Smug Scout does know that cooked fruit in a Mason jar is not called juice.  It is called backyard artisanal organic jam and costs much more than $9.50.
  3. What is that elusive fifth ingredient? Smug Scout imagines asking the Juice Maids for an answer to that (completely sarcastic) question.
  • Smug Scout: What is that elusive fifth ingredient?
  • Juice Maid: Love and spirituality.
  • Smug Scout: That sounds like two ingredients.
  • Juice Maid: You need both of them.
  • Smug Scout: Only if they come in a Mason jar with a bow tie. And a shot of organic vodka.

Smug Granola Fail

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If you must know, Smug Scout loves granola.  She eats it every morning she is forced to go to work.  She likes it because she can put ingredients (granola, yogurt, and of course local, seasonal, organic fruit) in her German reusable plastic container (yes, made in Germany!) and when she arrives at her desk mix it into a Smug L.A. version of Swiss Bircher Müsli. So she is always looking for appropriately artisanal granola, and when she saw Nana Joes Handmade Granola at the legendary Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, she had to have it, even though she does not understand the absence of an apostrophe in “Joes.” Let us consider why this granola seemed Smug:

  • Recycled looking brown paper bag
  • Unprofessional looking photo of joyous yet not attractive people
  • Label proclaims “handmade,” “vegan,” and “market fruit”
  • Contains white peaches, which are more elite than yellow ones
  • Has that boastful “SF Made” stamp on the back
Unfortunately, however, these attributes were not enough to give the product Smug stature, and it is all because of the white peaches, labeled ominously on the back of the package as NOT organic. Now Smug Scout has been known to buy non-organic white peaches if she interrogates the growers and finds out that they use organic methods but are just not certified. Okay, so these peaches are of questionable provenance, but the real problem is that these shady peaches were not baked with the granola but instead come in a separate little plastic bag. What is a plastic bag doing hidden in such outwardly Smug packaging? It is clearly there to trick and torment Smug Scout, who had a terrible time getting this plastic bag open.  She is sure it is a very noxious grade of heavy plastic, like the kind used to transport human corpses, because she could not open it with just her hands, and when she went to maul it open with a sharp knife, chunks of sulfite-dried white peaches went flying around her kitchen.  She became especially irate because it was 6 am and very far from an ideal time to be crawling around the kitchen looking for shockingly uniform clearly machine-diced non-organic white peaches.
On top of that, Smug Scout would like to point out crossly, she does not understand the point of crowing about Maldon Sea Salt.  First of all, there is no exotic faraway Maldon Sea. This is just salt from Essex (England, not New Jersey).  She would be much more impressed if the perky (but plain) pair on the bag would harvest their own salt from the Pacific, which would make this granola an honestly, rather than totally bogus, local product.
Does it even matter at this point that the granola was delicious?