"Disneyland on Alcohol: a Sober Journey Into the Hospitality-Industrial Complex."

Don't let City Hall see this, or they'll
be taking a junket to Sonoma for TIF opps.

This is a thoughtful article about the intersection of agriculture, tourism, law enforcement and gentrification. Meanwhile, "Disneyism" as a way of life has not ever made sense to me, even when completely smashed. As with religion, there's not enough alcohol on the planet to dupe me into believing the palpably untrue.

Disneyland on Alcohol: a Sober Journey Into the Hospitality-Industrial Complex, by Jonah Raskin (CounterPunch)

Lila Weinberger, the cofounder and co-owner of Readers’ Books, noted not long ago that, “If you offer wine and cheese at an event in Sonoma, people will be sure to come.” Indeed, it doesn’t take much. There was no cheese, but there was a bottle of Cabernet and another of Sauvignon Blanc at a recent launch at Readers’. By the end of the evening, the bottles were empty, the books sold and autographed by the author, Jeff Falconer, who told the audience, “Meditation is an internal energy massage.”

In Sonoma, wine is not only at Readers’, but also in bars, bistros, and supermarkets. It’s at bachelor, bachelorette and birthday parties, and at weddings that are often held at winery “event centers.” One can’t drive a mile in any direction from the plaza and not encounter Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines squeezed closely together and cultivated to maximize the weight of the crush and the alcohol level.

From all over the world, tourists come for a taste of what’s called “Wine Country Living” that has been created by the “hospitality-industrial-complex” which includes spas, restaurants, vacation rental and tasting rooms.

Some observers call the complex, “The Juggernaut.” All-too-often, politicians are beholden to it, while public relations employees sing its praises. Sly as a fox and slippery as an eel, the Juggernaut employs thousands of people who work in fields, warehouses, hotels, kitchens, dining rooms and on assembly lines that turn out millions of bottles of red, white, rosé and sparkling wines that bear the name Sonoma and that are exported around the world. Sometimes the wine in the bottles is made from grapes grown in the Central Valley and South America, and sometimes executives in France and China call the shots.

Still, if the valley is known for one thing, it’s wine, and, while some rejoice at the renown, others complain about what they call “Disneyland on Alcohol.” On the whole, the industry fails to live up to the standards it promotes in advertising and publicity ...

Shame on the farm in Sicily: "We are talking about potentially thousands of Romanian women as victims of serious abuse."

We visited Sicily for the first time last November, spending a week of contentment in the city of Catania on the island's eastern shore, with Mt. Etna a constant, fascinating presence.

While an active volcano poses a certain threat to human civilization, the rich volcanic soil it produces is an unqualified boon. There is a lot of growing going on.

As part of a volcano tour, we visited a vineyard and a honey vendor; moreover, much of our time in Catania was spent dining. We ate one fantastic meal after another, with an alarming weight gain mirroring time spent at the table.

In short, while we traveled nowhere near Ragusa province, Sicily's agricultural bounty was ever-present during our stay. If I'm to praise it, I'm also obliged to participate in shining a light on its dark underbelly.

Hence this article. The exploitation is sickening, and beyond the plain fact of it being inexcusable under any circumstances, that EU policies apparently promote one member nation importing members from another in this fashion is inexplicable.

Like slavery in America. We should know by now that the cost of our food supply often far exceeds the price we pay at the supermarket. Even so, the situation in Ragusa province is profoundly disturbing.

Raped, beaten, exploited: the 21st-century slavery propping up Sicilian farming, by Lorenzo Tondo and Annie Kelly (The Guardian)

Thousands of female Romanian farm workers are suffering horrendous abuse


 ... “When I came here I thought I was coming to a hard but decent job in another European country, but we ended up as slaves,” she says.

Hidden among fields of flapping white plastic tents across Ragusa province, 5,000 Romanian women like Bolos are working as seasonal agricultural workers. Their treatment is a growing human rights scandal, being perpetrated with almost complete impunity.

More about the future of food.

Lately, and for obvious reasons, I've been fond of saying that the first ironclad rule of sustainability is survival. Without respiration, the remainder is nothing but rhetoric. And then there's crop rotation, among other facets that we haven't been discussing.

What Farm-to-Table Got Wrong, by Dan Barber (New York Times)

... Today, almost 80 percent of Americans say sustainability is a priority when purchasing food. The promise of this kind of majority is that eating local can reshape landscapes and drive lasting change.

Except it hasn’t.

Also in NYT is a review of Barber's book.

A Chef in Search of a New Food Chain; In ‘The Third Plate,’ Dan Barber Meets Food Pioneers

 ... What he was searching for, he came to realize, was an organizing principle “reflecting a whole system of agriculture — a cuisine, in other words.” Mr. Barber makes his arguments directly but intermittently. Most of the time, in sections devoted to soil, land, sea and seed, he weaves his ideas and the changes in his thinking through a series of lively encounters with food pioneers scattered hither and yon.

Veggie by necessity?

Hilariously in this year of drought, there is as much an absence of American political "leadership" on topics like this one as there is rain. That's because patriotic American exceptionalism, rationalized by the purported deity's preference for robber baron capitalism, teaches us to scoff at the planet's needs.

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists ... Water scarcity's effect on food production means radical steps will be needed to feed population expected to reach 9bn by 2050, by John Vidal (guardian.co.uk)

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists.

Dig IN, earlier today.

"On August 26, 2012, Indiana growers will make their way to White River State Park to showcase their high quality, locally produced products, and remind Hoosiers there is much more than corn in Indiana. Dozens of Indiana chefs, brewers, wineries and food artisans will gather in the park to celebrate all that Indiana agriculture has to offer."
--from the Dig IN web site

My brewery crew would like to have Sun King's truck. I just want the delivery bike. We stopped to investigate Dig IN while driving back to New Albany from Lafayette, and it looked like a really good show to come.

Morrison on River Ridge: "When did we start farming brownfields?"

The newspaper dutifully “reports” a press release, while it is left to a citizen blogger to provide the background necessary to even begin asking the many obvious questions raised by the guileless stenography. So it goes in Stemlerstan.

When did we start farming brownfields?, by Curt Morrison at Louisville Courant

As a kid growing up in rural Southern Indiana, I knew the 10,000+ acre, Indiana Army Ammunition Plant was blighted by long-term pollution. My step-dad had told me. It wasn't a secret back then.

That's why I was surprised to hear in it's last meeting of 2011, the River Ridge Development Authority which has owned and controlled the former Plant since 1998, announced they're offering more than 360 acres of land to farmers. (News and Tribune: River Ridge offering land to farmers: Farm leases expected to bring in additional revenues)

Here's some poetry for you.

Farmer poet Paul Hunter's reading at Destinations Booksellers on Saturday was truly one of the most thoughtful, thought provoking presentations I've experienced since moving to New Albany. Personally, his stories and erudite phrase turns served as a reconciliation of sorts: my household's city dwelling tendencies are largely the result of shared rural roots and an urge to preserve them.

Hunter's latest work, One Seed to Another, though still skillfully presented among more anecdotal truth telling, is a little less poetry and more factual hammering.

Consider this passage from a section titled "The Great Thirst":

The most neutral way to consider our choices might be as a physics problem, energy in versus energy out. With traditional organic agriculture, depending on animal-powered or human-muscle input, once calorie of energy will grow to 4 to 6 calories of food. By contrast, using current agribusiness methods and equipment, it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food-- which makes traditional farming and gardening 40 to 60 times as energy efficient as petrochemical monocropping. And we include transportation, we climb aboard the fast track to absurdity.