We Can Eliminate Plastic Packaging
The 100% organic “artisan, produced in Italy, certified free of glyphosate, extruded with bronze dies” pasta I bought recently was delicious but they did not need to put a plastic window in the box. Plastic should be used for medical equipment and for essential industrial uses but not for food. Cardboard packaging is degradable but ideally we could use hemp fiber for paper products instead of trees.
Clam It!
The Zespri™ Kiwi fruit I ate recently with the non GMO verified logo on the box was packaged in cardboard outside of a plastic clamshell. Seattle based fruit marketer Oppy™ (The Oppenheimer Group™) could easily get rid of plastic and use that as part of their marketing/virtue signalling plan.
Saintly Gumbo
Delivered 7 pounds of frozen andouille sausage and prawn gumbo to my mutual aid pals yesterday. Also threw in some spicy red lentils and a bunch of random items that someone out there will appreciate. Delivering frozen goods gives my pals up on Capitol Hill more flexibility for their meal service.
Virtue Signal Alert
Been giving a few bucks here and there to a lady who panhandles outside our local gas station. She says she’s homeless but that a friend let’s her sleep on a spare couch in a basement for $25 a night. Our system has failed. I could go on and on about the end of the Roman Empire when the dysfunctional Senate served as window dressing for the oligrachs but I won’t other than to say that they didn’t have plastic back then.
Corporate Swill
Elysian Brewing has introduced Chucky: A Killer Wit Beer. This frightening beverage is “saturated with blood-red cranberry juice and entangled with pumpkin that’s been mangled into a puree.” I don’t respect any beer that doesn’t conform to the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot of 1513 which states that beer can be made from only water, barley and hops. They didn’t know what yeast was back then so these days we just say true beer can be made with only those four ingredients. For example, Budweiser is brewed with rice - a violation. Pumpkin spice in beer? A crime. And cranberry too? A horror.
Elysian Brewing was started in Seattle but is now owned by beer conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV.
Economical Coffee
Starbucks, as we know, is more about marketing and branding than it is about coffee. And long before Starbucks was a thing Seattle had branded coffee! In October 1917 coffee importer and roaster Schwabacher Bros. & Co. advertised themselves as “Seattle's Oldest Business House F. 1869” in a pitch for Emo coffee. “Vacuum packed on the only vacuum coffee machine in the state of Washington.” The Schwabacher brothers – German Jews from Bavaria – were once one of the most influential families on the West Coast. A couple of their buildings can still be seen today in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.
Starbucks threatened union workers in Texas cities, says labor board
Oh No
I’m thinking of writing restaurant reviews again and it won’t be pretty. For starters - I don’t think anybody has the god-given right to own a restaurant or to be bailed out by the government under the guise of compensating employees. I’m aware that wage and tip theft is rampant. And I’m more interested in focusing on labor as opposed to glorifying the management, who are more often than not self important small business tyrants with a total lack of self-awareness. I’m also a stickler for bad menu language, have been known to cry at a terrible restaurant and also to dumpster dive for clues.
–Alex