"We look forward to enduring this time, coming out stronger together."

I've likely said this before, but it bears repeating.

When the pandemic's lock-down doo-doo hit the fan blades, many in the local food and drink business were either catatonic (and understandably so; my empathy for them abounds), or, bizarrely, eager to dismiss hundreds of years of scientific achievement at the drop of a narcissistic and self-serving cap (purely inexcusable, then as now).

That's when the LEE Initiative made the biggest pivot of all and organized in a remarkably short time to help people who were in need.

What a concept.

Joe Phillips followed suit at Pints&union. He put people before profit and ran toward the fire. He converted the business into The Lee Initiative's relief outpost in SoIN. He ran himself ragged during the "business as usual" down time. He wasn't coming in every day and asking whether he was getting the credit and publicity. He did what was right, when it was needed.

Now Joe is doing it again, in conjunction with Steven Cavanaugh, our new general manager. Pints&union has safety protocols and socially-distanced indoor occupancy. We are enforcing safety, and our patrons get it. They know it's better to err on the side of caution during a public health emergency than to be the agent of dysfunction. We know better than to relax, but so far, it's going well. 

Speaking personally, it is a joy to be an employee in an atmosphere like this, one of integrity and respect.

Here's what Joe had to say about it in a recent  Edible Kentucky & Southern Indiana magazine article.

Rising to the Challenge: Pints & Union Restaurant

When the COVID-19 quarantine shut down local restaurants in March, we were devastated and silent. We all knew it was coming, but to know it’s knocking at your door is a very different reality than watching others face it on social media or television. We were shell-shocked for two days—then realized we needed to get back to work, somehow.

Knowing our perishable food would go bad, we donated it to our workers who were suddenly out of work. We needed a sense of purpose; we needed to give back to the workers who have been providing hospitality to our communities every day for years.

Chef Edward Lee and Lindsey Ofcacek, founders of the LEE Initiative, gave us that opportunity with the Restaurant Workers Relief Program. Thanks to a donation from Maker’s Mark Distillery, we gathered essential household items and served hot meals to feed laid off restaurant workers and their families every day. There are no words to fully describe what it felt like to experience the gratitude of the many service workers who received support and love during this scary time. With additional donations, we joined forces with 610 Magnolia, Lee’s flagship Louisville restaurant, to serve Louisville industry workers while still keeping tabs on the people we served in New Albany, Indiana. The streets were empty but our hearts were full, serving over 200 people per week. The program expanded to 18 other cities in the U.S., providing over 275,000 meals.

Moving forward, we are working with the LEE Initiative’s Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, a $1 million commitment to purchase produce from local farmers for restaurants to create more sustainable food supply chains. Restaurants that have hosted restaurant-worker relief centers will receive the food and help select other local restaurants to participate.

This remains a trying time for all of us. I have witnessed firsthand amazing beauty from great loss. I have seen open doors and hearts, open minds and people united for a greater sense of purpose. We look forward to enduring this time, coming out stronger together.

Be well,

Joe Phillips, Owner
Pints & Union Restaurant
114 East Market St.
New Albany, IN 47150
812.913.4647

Learn more about The LEE Initiative Restaurant Relief Program, Restaurant Reboot Relief Program, McAtee Community Kitchen, Restaurant Regrow Program and Women Chefs Program.

GREEN MOUSE follows up: "How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing."

Picking up where we left off on February 13, when I asked, "What sort of upper crust prohibitionist’s rationale is being advanced here?"

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Neo-prohibitionism, foppery and hypocrisy at Indiana Landmarks as Family Dollar on Vincennes gets a perfectly legal alcohol sales permit.

This led to a traumatic Facebook kerfuffle, deletions and recriminations, and subsequently I was made aware of other back-channel goings-on, but by then the dark pandemic clouds were gathering and nothing much happened with any of it. Honestly, I've no idea whether the Family Dollar in question ever received the alcohol permit.

At the time, I was perfectly well aware of the controversies engendered by the contemporary growth of Family Dollar, Dollar General and other such carpetbagging stores in the context of impoverished areas, employment practices, food deserts, inept local governments and a host of other ills that capitalism gleefully exploits for the benefit of the accumulators of capital, at the expense of ordinary people who exist to be steamrolled.

What particularly bothered me back in February was the involvement of Indiana Landmarks, whether active and real or merely tactically suggested by opponents of the Family Dollar alcoholic beverages permit, as well as the paternalistic attitude of more than one self-identified (and Reisz-stuffed) historic preservationist concerning their responsibility to help the poor folks lest too many paychecks get squandered on booze -- an argument that was tired and regrettable a century ago in the run-up to Prohibition.

To be precise, I take none of it back -- not a word -- and note only that with the intervention of more important matters, the discussion came to an end. So it goes.

Now, about Family Dollar, Dollar General and others of the species. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and in this gripping long read, Alec MacGillis explains "How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing."

 ... The Gun Violence Archive, a website that uses local news reports and law enforcement sources to tally crimes involving firearms, lists more than 200 violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores since the start of 2017, nearly 50 of which resulted in deaths. The incidents include carjackings in the parking lot, drug deals gone bad and altercations inside stores. But a large number involve armed robberies in which workers or customers have been shot. Since the beginning of 2017, employees have been wounded in shootings or pistol-whippings in at least 31 robberies; in at least seven other incidents, employees have been killed. The violence has not let up in recent months, when requirements for customers to wear masks have made it harder for clerks to detect shoppers who are bent on robbery. In early May, a worker at a Family Dollar in Flint, Michigan, was fatally shot after refusing entry to a customer without a mask.

The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores’ ubiquity: There are now more than 16,000 Dollar Generals and nearly 8,000 Family Dollars in the United States, a 50% increase in the past decade. (By comparison, Walmart has about 4,700 stores in the U.S.) The stores are often in high-crime neighborhoods, where there simply aren’t many other businesses for criminals to target. Routine gun violence has fallen sharply in prosperous cities around the country, but it has remained stubbornly high in many of the cities and towns where these stores predominate. The glowing signs of the discount chains have become indicators of neglect, markers of a geography of the places that the country has written off.

But these factors are not sufficient to explain the trend. The chains’ owners have done little to maintain order in the stores, which tend to be thinly staffed and exist in a state of physical disarray. In the 1970s, criminologists such as Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argued that rising crime could be partly explained by changes in the social environment that lowered the risk of getting caught. That theory gained increasing acceptance in the decades that followed. “The likelihood of a crime occurring depends on three elements: a motivated offender, a vulnerable victim, and the absence of a capable guardian,” the sociologist Patrick Sharkey wrote, in “Uneasy Peace,” from 2018.

Another way of putting this is that crime is not inevitable. Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar store chains would not have necessarily happened elsewhere. “The idea that crime is sort of a whack-a-mole game, that if you just press here it’ll move over here,” is wrong, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. Making it harder to commit a crime doesn’t just push crime elsewhere; it reduces it. “Crime is opportunistic,” he said. “If there’s no opportunity, there’s no crime” ...

Shut up and mask up -- but first, this Twitter user documents sweet freedom in a restaurant setting.

@libbyjones715 wrote these words on Twitter.

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Welcome to the Freedom Cafe! We trust you to make your own choices if you want to wear a face mask. And, in the same spirit of individual liberty, we allow our staff to make their own choices about the safety procedures they prefer to follow as they prepare and serve your food.

We encourage employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom, but understand that some people may be allergic to certain soaps or may simply prefer not to wash their hands. It is not our place to tell them what to do.

We understand that you may be used to chicken that has been cooked to 165 degrees. We do have to respect that some of our cooks may have seen a meme or a YouTube video saying that 100 degrees is sufficient, and we do not want to encroach on their beliefs.

Some of our cooks may prefer to use the same utensils for multiple ingredients, including ingredients some customers are allergic to. That is a cook’s right to do so.

Some servers may wish to touch your food as they serve it. There is no reason that a healthy person with clean hands can’t touch your food. We will take their word for it that they are healthy and clean.

Water temperature and detergent are highly personal choices, and we allow our dishwashing team to decide how they’d prefer to wash the silverware you will put in your mouth.

Some of you may get sick, but almost everyone survives food poisoning. We think you’ll agree that it’s a small price to pay for the sweet freedom of no one ever being told what to do - and especially not for the silly reason of keeping strangers healthy.

Zirin: "The NFL’s highly selective approach to player safety."

Cock-fighting and bear-baiting gradually became socially unacceptable, too.

What Can We Learn from the Opening Game of the NFL Season? Actually A Lot, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... How announcers navigate the fact that we are watching an entertainment that is unsafe at any speed will be something to chart throughout the season. As much as the NFL has tried to keep the dangers in the closet, they are now part of the narrative of a sport that bells and whistles aside, has probably began a generational downturn. No amount of seven-touchdown games can obscure what is coming: a mass reassessment of how we view this most American of games.