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BASIC BLACK I'm chewing as slow as I can! by Arthur Black Every meal I eat leaves me feeling like a loser. Not a weight loser - I eat 'way too much for that. I feel like a moral loser. I start each meal with a firm resolve to follow the advice my public school nurse gave my class, lo those many decades ago. "Chew each mouthful at least twenty times" Miss Patched told us. "It's the key to a healthy digestive system." system." I believed her. Still do. And each time I sit down to eat, whether it's a bowl of granola granola or a T bone with a baked potato, I tell myself that this time, THIS TIME, I am for sure going to do the twenty times per mouthful thing. Never happens. I always end up hoovering my plate clean in a feeding frenzy that would do a piranha proud. And our beloved food manufacturers aren't making my speed-eating an easy jones to kick. I don't know if you noticed or not, but fast food is getting faster every day. For folks who suffer from the twin afflictions*of liking yogurt and being in a hurry, there is a product called Yoplait Expresse. . This is yogurt that you can squirt straight into your mouth from a tube. Campbell's Soup has a new line they call Ready-To- Serve Classics. Forget about adding water and you can toss out your can opener to boot. With Ready-To-Serve Classics you just peel, nuke and slurp away. And for you folks who want your morning breakfast but can't spare the time to actually sit down at a table and eat it, Breakaway Foods has just the product line for you. They call it IncrEdibles. It's a full range of all your favourite morning treats - scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, pancakes with syrup... On a stick. Like a Popsicle. Now you can microwave ( your IncrEdible, run to your car and join the morning rush hour traffic jam, eating with one hand and steering with the other. If they come up with a way to glue a cell phone to the other end of the stick, life would be complete. And then there's PJ squares. If you're like me, a substantial part of your teenage diet was peanut butter and jam sandwiches. A slice of bread, a slash of butter, a gob of peanut butter topped with jam. Fast food doesn't get much faster than that, right? Wrong. You can now buy PJ squares. These are individually individually wrapped slices that have a thin strip of peanut butter on one side and a smear of jelly on the other. Just unwrap it, slap it on a slice of bread and lunch is made. Or if you're really desperate, desperate, forget the bread. Just roll up your PJ square like a limp taco and pop it in your mouth. Now THATs fast food. It gives a whole new intensity to the term 'eat and run'. And then there is the other end of the digestive spectrum: Slow Food. It's a movement that's already big in Europe (66,000 members strong) and beginning to catch on in North America. The Slow Food movement was founded back in 1986 by a group of -- surprise, surprise -- Italian food lovers who got sick and tired of the expanding expanding commercial juggernaut we call fast food outlets. Slow Food's whole premise: food isn't supposed to be fast. It's supposed to be leisurely and lovingly prepared and enjoyed. Eat and run? Forget it. Slow Food lovers believe a decent meal should take as long as an opera, a theatre production or a romantic rendezvous. rendezvous. They seek out and encourage restaurants that feature local recipes and cater to small, unhurried clienteles. Above all, they want us all to relax and take a breather with our meals. Their symbol is a snail. "Fast food is not genuine food," says a spokesman. "It fills you up without sustaining you. I think people are tired of eating things that have no taste, no history, no link with the land. They want something something better." Sounds good to me. I haven't seen any restaurants with a. snail logo on the menu, but I'll keep an eye out. In the meantime, I'm going to practice. practice. If you spot a guy in the local diner who's hunched over the blue plate special and looks like he's talking to himself, himself, don't call the cops. It's only me, in training. I'm chewing, Miss Patchett, I'm chewing. RECYCLE ■( Orono Weekly Times. Wednesday, April 17. 2002 7 Monday to Friday 8:00am - 6:00pm Saturday 8:00am to 5:00pm BILL and DONNA MORRISON would like to remind you that they mm hem to take mm of ail your Sears and Hardware needs UEJMI SEARS SERVICES: Catalogues ✓ Friendly Service Parcel Pick-Up / Heavy Goods Pick-Up Assistance ✓ Hassle-Free Returns Account Payments & Applications --i » ( advertisement) Accounting Corner Mistakes you cart make. from a tax point of view... Buying and selling real estate has some special taxation taxation rules attached. It's easy to do a purchase or sale wrong if you're not aware of these rules. The most common mistake is the selling of your principal residence. Basically, it generates generates no tax at all, even if there has been a substantial gain in value. But what is a personal residence? That's easy; it's your home, right? Obviously wrong, or I wouldn't have an article for this paper. "Principal residence" is only a taxation term to define which property you "elect" to be your principal residence. You may elect your house to be your principal residence, or you may elect your cottage. This would be extremely profitable profitable if you had the situation where you owned a house that had held steady in value and a cottage that had risen in price dramatically. You would leave the house "unsheltered" or subject to tax, while'the gain on the cottage is tax free. You make this election on the tax returns of the years you sell either property.. The election can be made on a year by year basis, so if you owned a cottage for five years and it increased in price dramatically, dramatically, while you also owned a house for ten years, you could elect five years to be free against the cottage, making the entire gain free, and elect the other five against the house making it approximately approximately half tax free. In actual fact, there is a clause in the rules that allows a duplicate year, designed to allow an extra deduction because in the year you move you will normally normally have two residences, and that wotild allow you to shield six of the ten years on the house. Astute readers will note that even if you follow the regular practice of claiming claiming your house as a principal residence, you can always shield at least one year of capital capital gains tax on the cottage using that extra year rule. There are surprisingly .few rules on this election. From a technical viewpoint, , the main rule is you must live in the residence at least one day in the year you wish.to shield tax. Other than that, avoid "manufactured" principal residences (eg. build a house, live one day in the house and se|l) and you should have no problems saving money from the tax man. The above article is for general purpose information only. Before acting on this, or any other information, readers should Seek competent professional advice, t Mark L. Hendrikx Tgl Chartered Accountant I " Certified Financial Planner I • Accounting and Auditing * tEH I • Computer Consulting • Planning & Taxation Services for Businesses, Individuals, Corporations, Estates and Farms ■ • Business Start-ups • Free Initial Consultation 37 King St. West, Newcastle, Ontario LIB 1H2 Fax:(905) 987-9809 • Phone:(905) 987-0570