Look in your pantry. Any idea where that food originally came from? Now, look at the ingredient list. According to Michael Pollan's Food Rules, if you can't pronounce every ingredient then you shouldn't eat that "food like substance."

At any of the the local farmers markets in our area, not only will you avoid "food like substances," there's a pretty good chance you can actually speak to the farmer responsible for growing the produce that's for sale.

By supporting local farmers you not only bolster their business, you will find your food is fresher and tastes better. You'll also reduce its carbon footprint and keep your hard-earned dollars in our community. And, really: Why eat an apple from Chile when you can eat one from North Carolina?

Today's Charlotte Observer has an article about farmer's markets that are popping up in South Charlotte. (Read it here.) But, those certainly aren't the only farmers markets around. Find the market closest to you at LocalHarvest.org, where you can sign up for a weekly e-mail with updates about the farmers markets in your area.

NCFarmFresh.com is also a great resource for finding local farmers markets, berry farms and plant sellers. A quick search came up with 28 opportunities to purchase locally grown produce in Mecklenburg County.

Challenge: Prepare a meal with all local ingredients.

From our friends at ProPublica.org:

March unemployment statistics are out today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate appears to have held steady at 9.7 percent. That’s what it’s been for all of 2010, so far.

On the whole, 162,000 jobs were added in March. McClatchy reports that this is the “strongest job growth since the nation entered recession in 2007 and the strongest confirmation yet that the U.S. economy is on the mend.”

But take this job creation statistic with another statistic.

In the same month, U.S. bankruptcy filings reached their highest since 2005, with 158,141 American consumers and businesses filing for bankruptcy. That’s a 35 percent increase from February, and a 20 percent increase from March 2009. According to Reuters, the new bankruptcy figure reflects “the unevenness of the economy’s stabilization after the deepest recession since the 1930s.”

Video from the grand opening of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library's Job Help Center in January is below. Note that the library's hours have changed, effective today. Check the hours for the job center and your local branch here.

Did you hear? Part of the health care reform bill includes a mandate that requires chain restaurants to include nutritional information on their menus. Hooray!

I think that's great. Yesterday, alone, I experienced calorie sticker shock twice ... but only because I researched the nutritional information of a couple of foods I planned to eat. (It's not like either restaurant offered any warning about the number of calories in their meals.)

I was in Uptown just before an event, and I was hungry. I walked around the block and made what I thought was a decent dinner decision. I stopped at Qdoba and chose a burrito off their menu. No cheese. No sour cream. No guacamole. No chips. No extras. Yes, their burritos are humongous, but I figured it couldn't be too bad. Rice, meat and vegetables in a wrapper, how bad can that be?

While eating, I used my smart phone to find out exactly how many calories were wrapped up in my flour tortilla. Guess how many? More than 800! For most people, that's almost half of their daily calorie allotment. Crazy.

Later, at Starbucks, I bought a small coffee. Into it I mixed fat-free milk and Splenda. Not so bad, right? No, but the Reduced-Fat Very Berry Coffee Cake I bought on impulse? That sucker just about cost me 320 calories. (I threw it away.)

It's easy to consume too many calories in our fast-paced world where processed foods are quick, cheap and ready to eat on every corner. That's why I'm one of the people who loves that fast food restaurants will soon post nutritional information on their menus. For those of us on a calorie budget — and who isn't? — that information will help us make better choices.

Hopefully, as people become more aware and vote for healthier meals with their hard-earned cash, restaurants will get the hint and stop adding bacon, cheese and sauce to everything.

Of course, we all know the best choices are usually found at your local farmers market and prepared at home.

Further reading: Calorie labels could lead to healthier food (Associated Press/ Charlotte Observer)

Some tips for eating healthier at fast food joints:

Well. That's nice.

For decades, women have paid more for health insurance. A lot more. But, thanks to health care reform, that trend has come to an abrupt end.

In the broadest sense, the new health care law forbids sex discrimination in health insurance. Previously, there was no such ban, and insurance companies took full advantage of the void.

Until now, it has been perfectly legal in most states for companies selling individual health policies — for people who do not have group coverage through employers — to engage in “gender rating,” that is, charging women more than men for the same coverage, even for policies that do not include maternity care. The rationale was that women used the health care system more than men. But some companies charged women who did not smoke more than men who did, even though smokers have more risks. The differences in premiums, from 4 percent to 48 percent, according to a 2008 analysis by the law center, can add up to hundreds of dollars a year. The individual market is the one that many people turn to when they lose their jobs and their group coverage.

Insurers have also applied gender-rating to group coverage, but laws against sex discrimination in the workplace prevent employers from passing along the higher costs to their employees based on sex. Gender rating has taken a particular toll on smaller or midsize businesses with many women, like home-health care, child care and nonprofits. As a result, some businesses have been unable to offer health coverage or have been able to afford it only by using plans with very high deductibles.

In addition, individual policies often excluded maternity coverage, or charged much more for it. Now, gender rating is essentially outlawed, and policies must include maternity coverage, considered “an essential health benefit.”

In a statement issued Thursday, Senator Mikulski said: “One of my hearings revealed that a woman was denied coverage because she had a baby with a medically mandated C-section. When she tried to get insurance coverage with another company, she was told she had to be sterilized in order to get health insurance. That will never, ever happen again because of what we did here with health care reform.”

Read the rest of this New York Times article, by Denise Grady, here.

Further reading:

• Youth pay a lot more for health premiums (A/MSNBC)
• Uninsured hoping for fast help from health care overhaul (Charlotte Observer)

From the U.S. Congress: How health care reform will help women:

Who is "they"? Good question. Maybe your insurance company. Maybe the manufacturer of your next car. Maybe the state. Whoever "they" become, software engineers are working to end texting and driving for good.

Of course, before "they" can enforce any laws, "we" must first determine how dangerous texting and driving is and which demographic groups shouldn't text while behind the wheel.

What do you think about this? Is texting and driving something you can do without cause for concern or are you so addicted to your smart phone and messaging services that you can't take a half-hour break to drive home?

Several software and gadget companies — many of them at the country's biggest trade show for the wireless industry last week in Las Vegas — have sprung up to address that challenge. But creating an effective, widespread solution looks a lot harder than putting in reminders for seat belts.

Furthermore, we're only just beginning to figure out what constitutes a dangerous distraction, and how best to curb it. Are hands-free conversations dangerous? What about dictating text messages to your phone? Does everyone need help staying away from the phone while driving, or just teens and employees?

Many states ban drivers from using cell phones without hands-free devices, but a recent insurance industry study found that such laws haven't reduced crashes. It's not clear why, but one reason might be that drivers flout the laws.

Read the rest of this Associated Press/ MSNBC article, by Peter Svensson, here.

What do you think about ads like this, from the U.K.? Are they effective? Do they encourage you to put your damn phone down and drive, or not?

If you've been paying attention to UNC Charlotte's economic guru, John Connaughton, you'll know that he's concerned about the vast amounts of cash banks are hoarding instead of lending. That's a problem.

When banks don't lend money, businesses can't expand, they can't hire people, those people can't spend money. It's a bad, bad cycle to get stuck in. It's a cycle we seem to be in currently.

It's also quite ironic, since we-the-taxpayers loaned the banks billions to pull their sorry assess out of a serious death spiral not that long ago.

But, now, the North Carolina bank commissioner is weighing in:

N.C. Banking Commissioner Joe Smith says banks must increase their lending to small businesses and help restructure the mortgage industry to help the economic recovery.

“These are tall orders but necessary for the good of the industry and the nation,” Smith said in an address to the Banking Institute in Charlotte, a gathering of industry leaders and regulators. “All stakeholders, including regulators, need to rethink their roles and focus on the big picture.”

Smith oversees 97 state-chartered banks and all mortgage lenders doing business in the state.

Read the rest of this Business Journal article, by Lee Weisbecker, here.

Catch up with Connaughton's forecasts, and sign up for a reminder about the next one, here.

A report about money hording, from November 2009:

Well, kinda. Read on to find out more ...

Question is, do we forgive them for their part in the banking chaos that led directly to the Great Recession? I tell you what would help, a giant check made out to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

Bank of America Corp. launched a program Wednesday that will offer mortgage-principal forgiveness worth about $3 billion to 45,000 borrowers.

The program will be used with other bank and federal efforts to help struggling homeowners, such as the Home Affordable Modification Program and National Homeownership Retention Program.

Only borrowers already eligible for loan modifications will be considered for the new program. And BofA says it will contact borrowers with the offer because only a limited group of customers will be eligible. The program is intended to serve borrowers who owe at least 120 percent of their home’s value and are more than 60 days past due on mortgage payments.

Any forgiveness will depend on the borrower making on-time payments for up to five years. If the home’s value rises, the amount of principal forgiven may be reduced.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Business Journal article, by Adam O'Daniel, here.

Who wrecked the economy?

From our friends at ProPublica.org:

March 23: This post has been updated.

In a blog entry over the weekend, John Hempton (once dubbed “financial blogger extraordinare”) explains that before there was Lehman Brothers’ now-maligned manuever called “Repo 105” ... there were, well, a lot of other banks also trying to do the very same thing.

Such as Bank of America, for instance.

As you may recall, Repo 105 is the accounting maneuver Lehman Brothers used to move billions in assets off its balance sheet, giving the appearance of greater liquidity, less risk, and therefore a healthier company profile.

Hempton runs us through some numbers from Bank of America’s 2006 annual report. See below:

(US dollars - millions)	Q4 2006	Q3 2006	Q2 2006	Q1 2006
Average total assets	1,495,150	1,497,987	1,456,004	1,416,373
End period total assets	1,459,737	1,449,211	1,445,193	1,375,080
end period less average assets	-35,413	-48,776	-10,811	-41,293

In each of these years, the bank’s assets at the end of the quarter were lower than its average assets throughout the quarter. This had been happening for a while, according to Hempton. But if the bank was moving its assets off its balance sheet, where was it moving them to? Hempton found the counterparty he believes was assisting Bank of America—Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ, which ended each quarter with higher assets than its average throughout the quarter.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon points out that the numbers we’re talking about here are big—on par with Lehman’s Repo transgressions.

I put in a call to Bank of America, and the media rep there told me he needs “to talk to a number of people,” seeing as the bank will “want to be thoughtful about it.” I’ll update as more information comes in, but given all the financial insiders talking about how Repo 105 was an “old trick,” this subject is one to keep watching.

Update: This afternoon, Bank of America’s media rep Scott Silvestri responded to my inquiries with this statement: “Efforts to manage the size of our balance sheet are routine and appropriate, and we believe our actions are consistent with all applicable accounting and legal requirements.”

This time, the North Carolina-based military-for-hire company, now known as Xe, is in trouble for hoarding automatic weapons. They claim they're only doing it as a favor to the local sheriff, but that might not be quite true. (Umm, why does the Camden County sheriff need AK-47s? What the hell is going on in the Outer Banks?)

Meanwhile, the company is hoping to expand their private army in Afghanistan with the help of another billion dollar contract from the federal government.

Any indictment, even of former executives, would be unwelcome news at a company beleaguered since a 2007 shooting involving Blackwater guards in Baghdad left 17 people dead. Under a new name, Xe, the firm is trying to win Defense Department approval to train police in Afghanistan. The contract could be worth up to $1 billion but has drawn the ire of some in Congress.

The potential charges stem from a raid conducted by federal agents in 2008 that seized 22 weapons, among them 17 AK-47s.

Multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the case said investigators are trying to determine if Blackwater obtained the official letterhead of a local sheriff to create a false justification for buying the guns. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Federal law prohibits private parties from buying fully automatic weapons registered after 1986, but does let law enforcement agencies have them.

Read the rest of this Associated Press/ Yahoo! News article, Devlin Barrett and Mike Baker, here.

"There shouldn't be any private armies, that's just asking for trouble," Moyock, N.C. resident featured in this video:

No, really: How's that ancient refrigerator of yours holding up? Still giving all of your frozen goods freezer burn? Then, check this out: We have a brief window of opportunity to buy new, energy efficient appliances and get a tax rebate for doing so. And, the bonus: You'll save money on your energy bill to boot. So, what are you waiting for?

Coming soon to an appliance store near you: the $300 million appliance version of the government's Cash for Clunkers program. To encourage consumers to transition to Energy Star appliances, the Department of Energy will offer rebates ranging from $50 to $300, depending on the price and type of appliance.

Money was given to each state based on population; South Carolina will get about $4.3 million, North Carolina will receive about $8.8 million. Some of the rebates will be instant, but others may require mailing in information. Be sure to have all the necessary documentation to include in that mail-in rebate.

The program starts in South Carolina on March 31 and will end when the rebate money is gone. You'll need to act fast if you live in North Carolina, where the instant rebate phase begins April 22-25 and the mail-in program starts in June.

To read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Tara McAlister, click here.

What appliances qualify? Visit EnergySavers.gov for a list.