A previous poster said: "for every bit you gain in long distance vision, you will LOSE in near vision... If you are about to get Lasik, please reread that. That is the case and very important.". I would like to know the source of that "fact", given that I have not experienced anything of the sort in the 4 years since I had LASIK done.

I agree with previous posters that the unfortunate reality is that elective medical procedures like LASIK are being aggressively sold and performed by any number of hucksters out there. You can't walk a few blocks in a city without seeing several ads for discount LASIK. As such, I firmly believe that you get what you pay for - although, in the LW's case, it's not clear what kind of doctor they saw, whether they got recommendations, looked up the doctor's record, etc., so that point may be moot for him/her. I was fortunate to have several optometrist friends who were able to recommend to me a very reputable and competent surgeon to do the procedure. YMMV.

Before I say my next piece, I must emphasize: there are definitely cases in which doctors should be sued, when negligence or incompetence has caused harm to people and justice must be served. However, I have also observed that people in this country are under the strong impression that medicine is perfect and infallible, and that if there is a bad outcome to a procedure, that automatically means someone should get sued. No one seems to understand that, if there is a 3% chance of complications, that means that on average, 3 in 100 people will have complications, even if the procedure is done as perfectly as possible - they just assume that, since the statistic is so low, that it couldn't possibly happen to them. Again, I have no idea in this particular LW's case if their problems are related to negligence or not - that's for another medical professional to decide. But this knee jerk reaction of some people to "SUE SUE SUE" is disturbing. I think it's indicative of our society today where we must blame others for all of our ills and cannot possibly accept the fact that life is not perfect, that sometimes go wrong and it's not actually someone's fault.

To that point, regarding the LW's blaming the friend for their decision, I must agree with others who have noted that the decision in the end was the LW's, not the friend's. I mean, I certainly understand the LW's reaction, and there is no doubt that they should tell their friend (if they truly are a friend) the full details of their predicament. But, yes, one needs to be strong enough to make decisions for themselves and to not just do something with risk involved because a "friend" was insistent on it and wanted to do it themselves. It seems to me that the only way to make peace with the situation is to 1) make the friend a scapegoat and send them off, never to speak to them again, or 2) to come to the true understanding, whether through therapy or inner reflection or whatever, that they decided to take a risk and unluckily came out with the short end of the stick, that such things happen in life, and that all that remains is dealing with the realities of the present situation without apportioning blame for the past. I wish them the best of luck and hope they can somehow reach that state of peace within themselves.

I really enjoyed this collection of anecdotes. Despite the title, the best of the stories are not primarily about the bad food the authors encounter, so much as the larger context, like the depressing squalor of the Sawyer household or the food-bare streets of Cuba. I was particularly moved by Julie Powell's recollection of her parents' separation. Her description of biting into the chocolate offered by her father's girlfriend was one of the most heartbreaking things I've read in a while.

I second that worthy notion, Alan.