What Do Roundworms Look Like

Is it OK to disguise generics as name brands?

The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds – we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money.

When I was younger, my mother used to buy generic versions of things and put the contents into name brand packages. She would refill a ketchup bottle with generic ketchup so that guests would see the name-brand label.

I understand why she did this. Many items are very similar whether you’re buying the generic version or the name brand version. At the same time, though, it’s dishonest. It also tells people that you’re the type of person that cares about having that name-brand ketchup on the table. Not only that, it makes the ingredient lists wrong, which can be an issue with food allergies in some cases.

What do you think? Is this a good way to go or is it dishonest?

Well, the area that actually concerns me the most is the food allergy issue. Regardless of how I felt about the generic versus non-generic issue, I wouldn’t do this with any food that I was going to serve my guests unless the generic and the name brand were an ingredient-for-ingredient match. There is no price that’s worth having a friend glance at a container, think a food is okay, and then get very sick because you bought the cheap version and disguised it.

I have friends with some very severe food allergies, including lactose intolerance and a frighteningly severe nut allergy. We are very careful with the foods we serve, and putting items in bottles with false labels can sometimes be a huge mistake.

So, aside from the food allergy concern, there’s still an interesting question here.

More than anything, the question is about the value of the perception of your guests. Is there really additional social value in serving a name-brand ketchup to your guests versus a generic one? Or is it simply something you’re perceiving and not something that’s real?

Speaking personally, I can’t conceive of being upset with someone who invited me into their home and served me generic ketchup – or practically anything else they served me, for that matter. If they were insulting someone’s religious practices or pointedly serving a food that violates someone’s known food allergy, that’s a different issue. Having generic ingredients is not a spiritual or physical bias for anyone (unless, of course, there are food allergies at work).

The How Of Y: Alas Poor Yorrick, We Knew Him Way Too Well

I’m not geneticist. I’ll say that up front. I took genetics in college and even though I have a degree in biology, my subspecialty was evolution/ecology which, while related, is a whole different can of worms. So apologies to all the geneticists out there for mistakes I might be about to make.

Last week I named Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man as one of my favorite Indie science fictions books . But I also claimed that it was more along the lines of soft sci-fi in that it dealt more with sociology than with physics, which is all well and good for the purposes of the story. If anything, BKV is a writer who was able to convince me that the science doesn’t always matter. A story is not necessarily satisfying because of its plausibility or capability of explaining exactly how a contrived scenario came to be. Then he went off to write for LOST but the less said about the hole that show fell down the better.

But the ending of Y (insert SPOILER WARNING) does leave us with a very intriguing question concerning societal rebuilding. I’m seriously about to get very spoiler-riffic here so do not continue if that might bother you. Everybody still with me? Great.

So at the end of the book we’re left with 2 genetically distinct men on earth: Yorrick and Vladmir. It seems like the world focuses on cloning Yorrick because Vladmir is off running Russia. Here’s the primary issue: cloning doesn’t work as well as sex. Eventually you need to get your society back to sexual reproduction. Sex acts like a remix for genetic material; it takes two sets of potentially screwy DNA from mother and father and zips them together into something that should work pretty well. The alternative is making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy forever. And anyone who has tried that trick with a Xerox knows that after enough copies of copies you’re left with an unreadable document. This is because a Xerox isn’t perfect, and thus tiny imperfections are left on the new copy of the document. And eventually those imperfections accumulate to the point where you’re left with an unreadable document.

This happens in biology too and is known as Muller’s ratchet. It was discovered in certain species of lizards that are all female . That’s right, there are no males in the entire population. The species reproduces by laying unfertilized eggs that hatch as genetic copies of the mother. And much like the Xerox, biology is far from perfect, so any copying errors in the DNA of the mother are passed onto the offspring. And so forth and so on until after enough generations the eggs laid do not produce viable offspring because they’re DNA is too corrupted. Thus each mutation (or copying error) cranks the ratchet forward a notch, and without sex to remix the errors the ratchet can’t ever be turned back. So while you save a lot of effort avoiding dealing with males, it’s a short term strategy for the species as a whole.

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