…and not for brunch. All mothers in the world are happier that we maintain our usual Sunday sleeping in habits.

But, yes, from 5pm to 11pm, we are bringing the goods. We think it should be manageable, ’cause in our experience “busiest restuarant day of the year” happens all before 2pm. ‘Though who knows, really.

Starting tonight we are serving pastured chili dogs.  A house made hot-dog with pinquito beans and house made chili, topped with 5 year cheddar cheese and chopped onions.

Drafts tonight are Hop Head Red, for which Green Flash recently took home a gold metal at the World Beer Cup and Rare Vos, Ommegang’s Belgian amber ale.

Cask is Karl Strauss Double IPA.

See you soon.

Back to the present: Max & Michael made a dish of Braise and Merguez, which is pastured spring lamb from Christine and Jim Maguire, part of it braised and part of it made into a Merguez sausage. I had this dish last nite and loved it, and I know we have a lot of Merguez fans out there.

Well, it looks like many months worth of behind-the-scenes effort is starting to take the physical form of a new Linkery restaurant on the corner of 30th and North Park Way. We anticipate that on Sunday 18 May, the Linkery will celebrate its last day at 30th and Upas, and re-open later that week at its new location: 3794 30th Street.

Most people reading this probably know at least a little about our move, but I also know that many of you also have at least some questions about it. So I’m slapping together this quick FAQ in the hopes that it is helpful.

Why is the Linkery moving?

So we can do a better job of serving our community. There has been such a large demand for what we’re doing — for which we are extremely grateful if a touch pleasantly surprised — that the space we’re operating out of is overloaded. Waits for a table can get long, the dining room is cramped and loud, and the working conditions aren’t very good either due to how crowded it is. And we’re preparing so much food it pushes the limits of our refrigeration, prep areas, and cooking/ventilation systems. All of these factors start to limit how well we can do our jobs, and in turn how well we can serve you. Oh, also, in order to keep pursuing the things that move us — handcrafting food and beverages outside the industrial process — we need the financial weight provided by a midsize restaurant.

Does this mean that prices will rise?

No, in fact, we anticipate the opposite. Without the financial pressures of very limited seating, we are really looking forward to introducing more lower-cost items to the menu and serving more of our community. In particularly we want to be more approachable to casual diners who just want a quick bite and a drink, while excelling at multi-course dinners as well. Of course, the price of food is very volatile right now so anything could happen, industry-wide.

Will you be better able to accommodate kids and families?

Yes, that’s a big goal for us in the new space. We have a family bathroom, a seating area which is designed to be family-friendly, and we will have an actual printed kids’ menu with dishes that are not too challenging for young palates but also embrace the Linkery spirit.

Will you take reservations now?

No, that still seems like one more thing for us to possibly mess up, which means it’s expensive to do it right, which means we would have to raise prices, which we don’t want to do (see above). We’ll keep it chalkboard style.

How ’bout private parties?

Yes! We have a private room which seats about 35. We haven’t figured out the finances yet but basically you’ll be able to rent that room for private events. Also, if you’ve got an organization that would like to meet there in “dead time” for us, let us know (after June, though). We’re open to using the space to serve our neighbors however we can.

Will the menu stay the same?

Almost entirely. We intend to add a few more lower-priced items and “bar snack” type items, to better serve folks who want a casual dining experience (see above). While still keeping our Market Menu which seems to be more appealing to people who are having a coursed meal. So basically it will be the same.

Will your hours change?

We’re thinking we’ll move the kitchen hours back by 30 minutes, so that first orders are at 5:30pm and last orders are at 11:30pm. The business hours will stay more or less the same, open from roughly 5pm to midnite.

Will you serve lunch?

Yes, eventually. That’s the plan, anyway. We’re opening a small sandwich counter that will serve simple sandwiches from house made ingredients during the day. Also, by autumn, we expect to open our full kitchen beginning in the early afternoon on Saturday and Sunday.

Will you serve breakfast at the new location?

If you look up and see a sounder of pigs flying over the new Linkery, that probably means we’ve started serving breakfast.

Will you have bike racks / dog parking?

Yes, though it may take a month or two.

Outdoor seating?

No, but those glass doors roll up so it feels like it’s outside. Which is neat.

Will you have more taps/cask/wine selections?

Yes! Though it may take a couple months to get everything up and running. When we are done, we will have
* 4 or 5 draft beers
* 5 cask beers
* 1 cask wine
* 4 specialty bottled beers on draft (through a modified cruvinet)
* 12 red wines on draft (with half glass and full glass pours)
* 4 or 5 white/pink wines by the glass

What other cool things will you have?

Well, we built room for a brewery which we hope to have licensed and running before the end of the year.

What else should I know?

1) It seems like we’re just moving, but really we’re building a new restaurant from scratch and then learning to drive it. We appreciate your patience as we get better with the new stuff, and we promise we will take care of you when we make mistakes and learn. Please help us by bringing things to our attention if they aren’t right.

2) We will probably not really be done with everything when we open. Physically the restaurant will be a work in progress for months — that’s how it was at the current place, too, and it works out well for everyone because we build it out organically according to what takes shape in the space with the whole community. Of course, we — the restaurant and the people — are works in progress as well, so it’s only natural that the facility would be, too.

Isn’t this change in scale going to change the essence of the Linkery and what we like about it?

Well, I suppose that’s possible. Many things will certainly be different. But the Linkery is really just a bunch of people — the people who work here and the people who come here — and those people will be the same. So I think the essence and spirit of the Linkery will be the same, even if manifested a little differently.

What’s happening to the current location?

I’m glad you asked! This event actually marks the birth of a new neighborhood restaurant, which is really exciting. We are committed to the location on 30th and Upas and to serving that immediate area with farm-to-table food, so we will continue to own and operate a restaurant at that space. But knowing that our hands would be full with our expansion, we’ve asked our friends Dennis and Elena to manage this new restaurant.

So, 30th and Upas will be home to Sea Rocket Bistro, a farm-and-sea-to-table restaurant throwing down beaucoup local seafood and produce and other good stuff. Dennis and Elena bring their own personality to the place, which means while the restaurant is in the Linkery family, it is also its own thing which I think is the best way for our ideas to grow. This restaurant will opening after the Linkery leaves the space, after the space is closed a brief time for redecorating and moving equipment, etc.

OK, thanks for making all this possible, we are very grateful to be a part of it. Next week we’ll be celebrating our last few days at the current location and 3+ years of great memories.

Some things I keep meaning to write in a little depth about, but seem to always run out of time, so I’ll mention them in no depth at all:

* BarCamp, to which I was introduced Saturday by Jed Sundwall. Really inspiring, thanks all. Sorry about the goofy suits, we were on our way to a Kentucky Derby party (they were a hit there, though none of my 3 horses even showed).

* And, via BarCamp, the history of the Mexi-Dog. Rafael, one of the attendees at the session, told me he hails from Ciudad Obregón in Sonora. He’s not sure, but it may be the original home of the bacon-wrapped frank, or in any case they were served there in the mid 1970’s and he’s unaware of any place doing it further back. If you know, bring some stories!

* Waffo. Awesome do-it-all (design, manufacture, blanks, wholesale, retail, etc., etc.) clothing company in the East Village. Like American Apparel with the Humbert Humbert dialed down. Check out their about page. If you visit, tell Beau I said hi.

* A great dinner at the Pearl. Those Trey and Spencer guys apparently know what they’re doing.

* Ra Ra Riot Yes, band member Milo Bonacci shares a surname with his brother Max Bonacci, who happens to lead the Linkery kitchen. But we actually love them more for their great music.

* Oh, and (as you may have seen at the link above) Ra Ra Riot playing with What Made Milwaukee Famous, at the Glass House in Pomona on 16 May! If you come in for dinner that nite and don’t recognize anyone, it’s cause we’ve all gone to the show. Please don’t steal anything while we’re out.

* Mexi-dog is sold out. Michael and Max are talking about making all-pastured chili dogs next week, so there.

* House made country ham is on the menu, I believe through Wednesday nite only (you can always call or email before you come in to see if something is available, if your heart is set on it).’ house cured blackstrap molasses country ham (of pastured Berkshire pork from Metzger Farm), goat cheese aioli, Lollo Rossa lettuce (Wingshadows Hacienda), marinated baby onions, house baked rosemary-olive oil bread, blood orange.

* Ranch egg fritatta: pastured chicken eggs (Wingshadows Hacienda), organic cabbage greens, green garlic (both from La Milpa Organica), medium aged Gouda cheese (Winchester Farms), button carrots, onion (both from Wingshadows Hacienda), salad of organic mixed greens with Meyer lemon vinaigrette or you can get it with added house cured pancetta (Vande Rose Farms).

* On draft: Craftsmen Valencia Orange Grove Ale, brewed with whole organic Valencia Oranges from Southern California. Mark throws the whole oranges in, ’cause the skin and pith provide bitterness and he uses less hops accordingly. Cool, no? This won silver at the Great American Beer Fest in 2000 in the fruit category.

* On Kask, Karl Strauss Double IPA. It’s good.

All-Pastured Super Mexi-Dogs hit the grill in 10 minutes (Friday at 5pm). People have been stopping me on the street to ask.

Happy May 1st!

This month The Linkery is more than happy to support ARTS: A Reason To Survive as this month’s charity.

ARTS believes that the creative process of the arts is therapeutic. They provide a safe, nurturing and fun environment where kids work with positive adult mentors in visual, performing and literary art mediums.

Artists, musicians, poets and more, teach kids techniques and concepts so they can explore their creativity, express themselves and create something of themselves.

ARTS is comprised of volunteers from all walks of life who possess a great variety of skills. If you’re interested in volunteering some of your time, click here to find out how you can help. Artistic ability or background is encouraged but not required to volunteer. They are also looking for volunteers with numerous other skills to help in the office, sit on committees, or even on the Board of Directors. We can never do too much for the kids!

Speaking of kids..last month you helped us raise $566.00 to donate to the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation! We appreciate your contributions and thank you for allowing us to give back to others.

-lisa

All-Pastured Super Mexi-Dog is here, too. Actually, it will be here on Friday. Bacon-wrapped hot dogs, a la the street carts of Tijuana, are a favorite of ours, but — and I know some folks disagree with this for street food — we like it when it’s made from artisanal ingredients, preferably which are made and/or raised by friends of ours. So, this is a Linkery-made all-beef hot-dog (from 100% pastured beef from Jim Neville in San Luis Obispo), wrapped in Linkery-cured bacon (pastured pork from Barney Bahrenfuse of Grinnell, Iowa), in a roll made by Susanna Starcevic at Bread on Market, with various house made and local toppings. We’ll offer it starting Friday.

Pastured spring lamb is here! These are from Christine and Jim Maguire at Rinconada Dairy — makers of the artisanal cheese Pozo Tomme — in the Central Coast (outside of Paso Robles). Dairy lambs give birth every winter, and young lamb is thus a traditional Spring dish. As of tonite we have grilled lamb leg, and the specific cuts will change every few days as we sell through them.

In which Doug and I debate Farmageddon while revealing potentially mockable tastes in periodicals and music.

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com
date Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 5:35 PM
subject the economist on food prices

A story you might find interesting. The Economist’s take on the macro world food situation:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=11050146

from jay@thelinkery.com,
to doug@eats.it
date Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 4:50 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Unfortunately, the Economist is capable only of seeing agriculture as a factory industry, and so misses the underlying issue, which is that humans are at a population level which requires unsustainable agriculture to survive. Since this agriculture is unsustainable, lots of people are going to have to starve to death at some point (when the inputs no longer yield the same output), given that we’re unlikely to sharply reduce human population through voluntary birth control. Starving to death is likely to be proceeded by malnutrition and riots, ’cause folks aren’t down with that.

The only “soft landing” is to slowly convert all our agriculture to be sustainable, while localizing it so that people kind of naturally don’t have kids they can’t feed. The more we do it, the softer our landing will be, but I think the dominant situation will be large-scale starvation. I mean, I would think probably not within our lifetimes, but 100 to 200 years out, sure. I don’t usually mention it on the blog, ’cause it would bring people down, you know? But what else could happen?

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com,
date Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 5:05 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Starvation? Aack. How Malthusian of you.

Traditionally, we’ve done a good job of advancing technology to address resource shortages. Farm the seas, grow meat, eat asteroids, and that kind of thing. Humans being human, we wait until the last minute before jumping into action. Won’t that work this time around?

I could be optimistic. ( I’m still waiting for scientists to say, “Hey, we just invented the Ozo-matic 1000, and now all we have to do is plug it in and point it at the sky over Antarctica”. )

from jay@thelinkery.com
to doug@eats.it
date Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 5:13 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

I agree, if by “traditionally” we’re talking about a 200-year time frame. The issue is that a 200-year time frame is nothing. We figured out farming 10,000 years ago, and did more or less the same thing until this industrialization/technology experiment started 150 years ago. Which equilibrium will we tend to revert to…1950 AD or 5000 BC? I think that we’ll find this 150-year project is a dead end, since we’ve no indication that it’s sustainable and no other species in geological history has been able to break the rules, unless the dinosaurs are actually out farming on a comet somewhere…

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com,
date Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 7:34 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Ok, you’ve got me thinking. What is agriculture if NOT a factory industry? Aside from the romanticized ideal of a man connecting with the earth in the most primal way possible, doesn’t a farm take inputs (soil, seed, sun, fertilizer) and turn them into marketable outputs? Doesn’t every factory want to ensure a steady supply of quality inputs while running the most efficient operation possible?

I’m not trying to dismiss the romanticized ideal… I’m a casual gardener myself, because it makes me feel good to see my plants thrive. I also get a warm fuzzy feeling at farmer’s markets and I appreciate better produce. So, there’s something there for me. But I’m not sure this ideal has much of a place in feeding 6.6 billion people.

I’m a novice here, so go easy on me.

from jay@thelinkery.com
to doug@eats.it
date Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:39 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

OK, think of the one big ecosystem in which live, often referred to as “Earth”. (It’s more than that, of course, but expanding it to include the Universe doesn’t really change this analysis). There’s one obvious input, energy from the sun. Plus there are some easily-accessible energy reserves which accumulated over time, principally fossil fuels. There’s matter in general, which is also a kind of energy reserve (cf. Big Al Einstein), though not as easily accessible to other matter. And there’s this thing called Life which we don’t understand very well but has existed in nearly infinite manifestations for a gazillon years, and which has as its essence the ordering of energy/matter in the face of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

This ecology goes on for billions of years, with the only external input being energy from the sun, which seems a fairly dependable input for our purposes. Or at least there’s no reason to start planning today for its extinguishment. All the other “outputs” and “inputs” are just parts of the cycle, where energy/matter gets reordered in a way which perpetuates the existence of the entity we understand vaguely as just Life.

A truly sustainable farm is a sub-ordering of the big ecology, which follows more or less the same rules as the big system. The “output” from any one process is an “input” to another process, all the way to the farmers being buried on the same plot and feeding their own carbon back into the soil. (Simple example: pigs eat the chicken guts and table scraps, their manure fertilizes the crops, and their bodies feed the farmer, who tends the crops and makes more table scraps and chicken guts).

A sustainable farm doesn’t change the game of the big ecology, but it concentrates the flow of matter/energy so that at all points more Life is being sustained by the same amount of matter/energy — more of the matter/energy is kept in its “quick” form rather than its “dead” form. For this reason, a farm can support more animals, plants, and humans than the wild typically does. In a bigger picture, a group of farms can support a town, and a region of farms can support a city (up to a certain size, anyway).

An unsustainable ecology goes beyond the rules of the big ecology and starts subsidizing the existing energy/matter quantities with extra energy/matter drawn from elsewhere in the environment, depleting the other players in the big system for the sake of certain life manifestations in the specific “taking” small system. Currently this is done primarily by converting reserves of fossil fuel into energy, which is easily done, but additional energy/matter is also “taken” in the form of introducing chaos to other dimensions of the environment (i.e., pollution, reduced soil fertility, poor nutrition, all of which are a weakening of the natural integrity of Life’s essence of ordering energy).

Now, with a globalized agriculture economy, there is basically only one ecology which depends on burning up all the fossil fuel we have and extracting fertility from all our land, and the system’s byproducts — rather than perpetuating the existence of Life — weaken the strength/ability of Life. That is, rather than fading into carbon and nitrogen which feed the soil, industrial byproducts weaken Life’s ability to continue manifesting itself. Obviously, this system will crack at some point, as the lowering supply of fuel, the demands of increasing population, the diminished capability of the land, and the destructiveness of industrial byproducts reach a level where X million of the existing people just don’t get fed.

Because we live in a global market economy, this event will not be very spectacular, it will just take the form of basic food being more expensive than X million people can afford. There will be shuffling of resources to make it seem like governments are not being heartless, and many people will be kept alive on untenable subsistence diets much as cows are now fed with corn, and presumably wars, genocide, or disease will do enough of the actual killing so that it doesn’t appear that industrialized nations/agriculture is the root cause. And, in a way, that’s true, because these X millions of people wouldn’t have existed anyway if we weren’t temporarily on the teat of a system with a short life span.

To me this scenario is basically unavoidable and not worth worrying about (True, I hope I’m not in the dead pool, but in the big picture that doesn’t matter that much either). The interesting part is how bad the shock is (i.e, how big is X), and how long the “negative gain” situation — an idea of farming which is basically killing Life — goes on before we switch back to non-extractive methods of ecology influence. Both of these variables can be addressed now, buy rebuilding into our capabilities the essential idea of feeding ourselves while remaining a part of the ecology, not a master of it (mastering ecology is a foolish, destructive vision, as we have seen).

J

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com
date Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 4:04 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Ok, I’m learning.

Couldn’t a theoretical tech improvement provide new a new source of energy to this system? The sun has been around longer than I can fathom, and it has tucked its energy into the resources we consume. The energy of wood was harnessed as soon as allowed by the evolution of our frontal lobes, coal has been in use since the Stone Age, and oil wells were first drilled around 400 AD. Atomic energy was first postulated around 1900 and realized a few decades later. Yes, I’ve cherry-picked a few events in this chronology, but I think tech innovation is an exponential curve. When we set our minds to it, we’re clever beings, and it surprises me that we grow crops with the energy in poop.

( I’m not trying to disrespect the power of manure, but ask Laura what it was like to spend four years in rural Ohio chasing an education as she lived downwind of a cattle ranch. )

There’s a huge financial incentive to find a new way to harness energy from the universe, and when scientists address it, it is likely out of economic self-interest (”hey! let’s get filthy RICH!”) rather than an altruistic desire to feed man. But still, in the end of the day, man gets fed.

I believe you that the current farming situation is not sustainable, but one thing that we’ve demonstrated as a species is that situations don’t stay current for a long time. In this situation, I’m walking on a tightrope in the belief that they’re knitting the safety net under me as I go.

From: jay@thelinkery.com
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:19:49
To: doug@eats.it
Subject: Re: the economist on food prices

Well, I don’t buy it, for a couple reasons.

First of all, “we’ve always figured something out in the past, so we’ll figure out something in the future” is an induction fallacy. I’m sure the pterodactyls were like, “we’ve got this shizz wired, yo. First the whole protective egg thing, then flight, and then badass beaks. Nothing can stop us now.”. And then they either ate up all their food and/or a big asteroid came, neither of which they had a good solution for.

Same thing with the Neanderthals, right? They were running things until their distant cousins the homo whateverus showed up and wiped em out. (I may be getting my hominids confused, but the point holds).

At any time in the history of Earth, there is a dominant species that has deftly handled every challenge thrown their way. Protozoa were freaking geniuses at some point. And then, always, something has happened that the dominant species hasn’t handled, or hasn’t handled as well as other species did.

Now, we may believe in man’s exceptionalism, and I do too, to a certain extent, but our survival and thriving isn’t guaranteed. We are not fully exempt from the laws of the universe just because we built aqueducts and split the atom.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m not sold by the as-yet-unknown magic bullet in the future: if it depends on creating energy, it ain’t gonna happen. According to our current understanding of physics, the amount of energy/matter in the universe is fixed, and is it is never created or destroyed. It just changes form. “Creating energy”, as you use the phrase, is simply to undertake to change matter/energy into a form which is more easily accessible to our machines and/or bodies.

So, let’s accept, for a moment, the proposition that science can always find a way to release more energy to us. Let’s say UC Cargill researchers develop a machine to turn rocks into pure human nutrition. And we keep expanding human growth and human reach until we eat up all the rocks, but then we adapt that machine to work on Cadillacs, Lincolns, Mercurys and Subarus. Then, when there’s no more cars, we eat up bars, where people meet. The logical end to this is a very specific kind of Rapture: a world comprising nothing but people and a machine that turns every substance including dead people into people-soluble energy.

While I disagree that we have the science to make it happen, I agree that this scenario represents a kind of sustainability. But here’s the rub: this machine already exists. Pull the camera back a little bit, substitute “life” for “people”, and see that evolution and/or divine guidance has built an amazing, complex machine that human science will never match, that does the exact thing that human science is laying claim to. All we have to do is accept our place in the cycle, and it will go on as long as the sun fires — which should be long enough for us to achieve whatever our purpose here is.

For ego reasons, we are trying kill the beautiful, functioning machine to replace it with our own machine. It’s patricide, and patricide rarely pays, at least according to our own, evolved, stories. And we even know our new machine doesn’t really work yet, but we think we can keep improving it by orders of magnitude to generate the necessary revenue before the bills are due. This, I believe, is madness.

But I used to manage software projects.

J

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com
date Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 6:41 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

C’mon, be fair. The pterodactyls and protozoa never had the cognitive abilities to recognize their role in the world, nor did they have the ability to understand the long-term consequences of their actions. We might have to fear something like the Neanderthal’s Homo Whateveri, because I’m not ready to rule out the existence of deep sea inhabitants who occasionally emerge and take their saucers for joyrides, but it seems unlikely. As you say, we’re exceptional. (I think that eventually, though, we WILL be able to build a machine that is superior to us, but we’ll have to dumb it down so they don’t take over.)

I completely agree that we can’t “create” energy– we’re bound by physics. We can harness the energy we’ve got, and I think we have enough here to keep us going for billions of years. And at the risk of getting all Asimov on your ass, when we eventually drain the reserves that the sun has provided, we can suck the energy out of the stores provided by another one. We can either go there or find a way to bring there here.

Before that, I believe that someone like Cargill WILL develop a way to eat rocks. Not in my lifetime, of course, but it’s going to happen, and they will be delicious. At least from from a historical perspective, we’re already on the cusp of farming the seas and growing “meat” in the lab.

I think this comes down to an intergenerational bet. I’ve got $100 that says we’ll kill ourselves with weapons before we starve ourselves to death.

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com
date Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:00 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

But what do I know? Check this out:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120881517227532621.html

The Wall Street Journal!

from jay@thelinkery.com
to doug@eats.it
date Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 1:52 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Our evolved capacity for problem-solving thought is no different an adaptation than opposable thumbs or talons. It just feels that way, because light reflects off opposable thumbs at a frequency which triggers your sensory perception, whereas to see thought happen it takes a fancy MRI machine. But both of these are just Life ordering energy.

Sometimes the adaptations work, sometimes they don’t. As you know from your diligent reading of John Nash and Richard Dawkins (or anyway I think so, I just saw the movie trailer and skimmed something in People), sometimes an adaptation works well enough to dominate the game for a long time…and then lose.

Our problem-solving adaptation has come to define us, to the point where we’ll tear down the functioning ecology on the bet that we can build a new one that won’t kill us. We can’t bear to stop solving problems and to live within the functioning ecology. We attach so much significance to problem-solving, I believe, because we can’t visually see that thought is just a tool like opposable thumbs. Thinking seems magical and godlike. But evolutionary neurobiology is finally showing us the physics of thought, and it looks a lot like, you know, everything else. I’m hopeful that when we understand that thought doesn’t make us special — beyond being really good solvers of a certain class of four-dimensional problems — that we will slink back to our place as part of a beautiful, benevolent system.

Which means growing the right amount of food, dammit.

Barry from La Milpa Organica put it a great way to me yesterday: until a few hundred years ago, we used more or less one calorie of human energy to cultivate one calorie of food, systemwide (OK, a little less in Europe, and wherever else there were cities). That was a balanced system that worked for 10,000 years. Then, 150 years ago. we decided to change that, to use almost no human energy, and instead to use 10 calories of fossil fuel energy per calorie harvested, and basically to exponentially increase the population as well, indefinitely. I know that there’s always a spare sun we can harness, and that sounds like fun, but I still maintain that the most likely result of:

- continued high population growth, combined with
- farming methods which deplete accessible energy, in
- a system with fixed energy resources, most of which are currently inaccessible to us

is, you know, lots of people at some point not having food.

I’d take the $100 bet except that I think “lots of people starving to death” will technically take the form of killing ourselves with weapons, for obvious reasons. And of course, we’re unlikely to eliminate all our food at once, so it’s not like everybody will starve, although if the number is high enough the weapons thing could get out of hand.

So, anyway, we should go about proving that we can still feed ourselves on more or less one calorie of human energy for each calorie of food grown. If enough of us do it, the switch back to a balanced system will be possible and less painful.

from doug@eats.it
to jay@thelinkery.com
date Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 4:11 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Thanks for this, Jay. It makes sense to me, and I now understand what you meant in your criticism of The Economist’s “factory industry” viewpoint: you’d like them to open this up and show some respect to the first law of thermodynamics and give a nod to the havoc the current system is wreaking on our ecosystem.

I believe we’re sitting on a huge amount of untapped, stored energy here on Earth, and I think that we’ll find a way to get us some of that within the next 50 years.

Here’s a fun fact for you: A quarter of the petroleum consumed over history was consumed in the last 10 years. (From today’s kottke.org).
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/car/greene.html

–Doug

from jay@thelinkery.com
to doug@eats.it
date Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 7:08 PM
subject Re: the economist on food prices

Awesome, it is actually really helpful for me to try to articulate these things that have been nagging at me. I think the dialog is much better than trying to just write something.

J

For those of you that didn’t make it in to your favorite haunts last week during the Craft Brewers Conference and World Beer Cup, or maybe it was too crowded for you to get in the front door (Hamilton’s?), we managed to hold back some of the flavors of the week for y’all to try. Tonight on cask, at 5pm, we’re tapping the 2008 Surf’s Up Symposium IPA. This was the beer brewed as a collaborative effort between Green Flash Brewing and the San Diego Brewer’s Guild, then bottled and given to each attendee of the conference as thanks. It also showed off a little San Diego swagger in terms of hops usage in this year of the hop-ocolypse. It’s rather low in alcohol for a San Diego IPA (it would classify as a single), and is hopped six ways from Sunday.

We really don’t need to truck much food in at all. (Pretty amazing to think that midcentury, personal gardens provided 40% of Americans’ food). Seems to me that the Linkery or any community restaurant could be a vessel through which our community feeds itself from our own gardens.

When I blithely assert that industrial farming creates the perception that food is cheaper than it really is, via direct government subsidies and through the externalization of costs including environmental and health damage, this is what I’m referring to.

One suspects that the exact numbers are open to argument, because indirect cost calculations always are. But the underlying mechanisms are, I think, unavoidably there.

Lost in the World Beer Cup madness has been the fact that we’ve also been working on expanding the breadth and depth of our wine list. It’s an ongoing process, of course, but we think we’ve made some good progress. You can decide for yourself by viewing our bottle list (for both wine and beer) online here.

We’ve been working for quite a while to develop a source of local or regional grassfed beef from which we could make our burger. A couple times we thought we were getting close, only to encounter setbacks which we haven’t yet overcome.

In the meantime, it’s been weighing on us that developing viable alternatives to the the corn economy is an important part of what we’re doing here, and that as our burger is probably the most well-known item on our menu, it’s really time for us to at least serve it with 100% grassfed beef, even if it’s imported from another region.

So, as of today, we’re switching our burger to be made with house ground chuck from 100% grassfed beef from Tallgrass Beef in Kansas. It’s delicious and I think this change will make our burger even more popular.

At the same time, a couple notes:

* We will continue to work on developing additional sources of pastured beef closer to home; and

* This switch away from Brandt Beef in our burger occurs despite of our deep admiration and respect for the Brandt Family, who are not only great people but, as I have often asserted, part of the solution, not part of the problem. For the Brandts to work the pasturing of cattle into their established Imperial Valley operation is a different kind of challenge than doing so in other areas of the country, and while I’m sure it will happen it can’t be expected to happen immediately. We still love the Brandts and their farm, it is just the case that our mission takes us elsewhere at the moment.

Arnie Johnson, friend of The Linkery, brewmaster of Marin Brewing Company in the bay area, and recent medalist at the 2008 World Beer Cup, was kind enough to hook us up with a keg of his ESB before he left town. Arnie won a silver and two bronzes at this year’s awards. He’s a good friend of Chuck Silva’s (from Green Flash), and rumor is that they’re concoting something special for our grand opening, when we move up the street.

Also on tap, we have Craftsman Brewing’s Triple White Sage, and ale brewed with white sage, natch. What a great compliment to our sage-infused water!

Our casks are AleSmith X and Green Flash’s Double Stout. Both AleSmith and Green Flash (and many other SD breweries) took home gold medals at the WBC as well, and hopefully I’ll be able to blog about that soon. Chuck Silva was nice enough to invite me along to the awards ceremony, which was quite a sight to see. Stay tuned.

Yup…three unique items tonite:

* Scotch Egg: hard boiled ranch egg (pastured chickens from Wingshadows Hacienda), house made sausage (pork from Vande Rose Farms, sage, thyme, black pepper), loquat syrup (Joel Lirot’s house in South Park), roasted pepper sauce, Lollo Rossa lettuce (Wingshadows Hacienda)

* Pastured New York Strip Steak: 100% grassfed beef (Jim Neville, San Luis Obispo), Maytag blue cheese, spiced cauliflower hash (organic cauliflower from Bonsall Farm), annatto chile oil, fresh herbs

* Super Freak: Superfreak, Belgian IPA aged over one year in oak Grenache barrel, spiked with Brettanomyces Green Flash Brewing Co., Vista CA. I just tasted this and it is amazing with a creamy, rich mouthfeel, mild tartness, and hints of fruit and vanilla. Thanks Chuck and Erik!

Just a quick one: With pretty much the world’s entire craft brew community in San Diego right now, folks in our ‘hood tonite are celebrating Green Flash Brewery and Brewmaster Chuck Silva. Chuck lives in here in North Park and is a real friend to all of us. His beers, of course, are world class.

Hamilton’s Tavern in South Park is hosting Green Flash tonite, with (on draft) CBC Symposium, Le Freak, Double Stout, Grand Cru, Imperial, West Coast IPA, Trippel and 06 BarleyWine, and (on cask) Double Stout and CBC Symposium IPA. I think this starts around happy hour, and Hamilton’s is at 1521 30th St.

Also, tonite, Ritual Tavern (4095 30th Street) is hosting a 4-course beer dinner with pairings of Green Flash beers, including Grand Cru on cask, Le Freak, Nut Brown, and West Coast IPA.

It’s a great nite to come out to 30th St, eat great food and drink great beer, and say hi and thanks to Chuck for all his contributions to our community. When you’re in transit between Ritual and Hamilton’s, feel free to stop in and have a taste of the Green Flash beer we have on tap right now: Super Freak (which I believe was named by Louis from Liar’s Club), which is Le Freak (a Belgian IIPA hybrid style) aged in a Grenache barrel provided by San Pasqual Winery’s Erik Humphrey. But be sure to designate a driver!

Now that you’ve made a mad dash down to the post office to mail off this year’s tax return, swing on by for a glass of Moonlight Brewing’s fantastic and appropriately named black lager, Death & Taxes. This beer has a cult following around these parts and is not to be missed.

Also not to be missed is our new starter that’s been over six months in the making. That’s right. Country ham (awed hush). Last summer we took one of our Berkshire breed fresh hams from Metzger Family Farm in Kansas, made a cure consisting in part of blackstrap molasses, smoked it over red oak, and squirreled it away to dry cure. We gave it try about a week ago and pronounced it “good to go”. We’re serving it sliced paper thin over a piece of our house made rosemary-olive oil bread, with a goat cheese spread, blood orange segments, and fabulous greens and marinated onions from Wingshadows Hacienda.

As for the rest of the cask and draft lineup tonight, we’ve also got Ballast Point’s hoppy session ale, Even Keel. It’s sort of a half-IPA. On cask is Coronado Brewing’s Red Devil, an imperial red ale, and Firestone Walker’s Pale Ale, a barrel fermented award winner.

It’s always nice, when, after I spout off generalities, a legitimate newspaper provides actual facts which I can then crib as support. Specifically, a few days ago I speculated about the possible end of the Butz era of low-priced foods, and yesterday the WSJ printed an article explaining the economics behind it, with a chart and everything.

What really interests me about the article is that it goes down one more level, showing exactly how rising crop prices benefit the corporations (such as Cargill and Monsanto) that make farm inputs but not the farmers. This is something that really struck me when I traveled through Iowa last year, which I wrote about in detail here.

It’s a common and widely perpetuated falsehood that our agricultural subsidies and corn economy benefit family farmers in the Midwest, but, in the long run, it’s simply not true. Cargill, Monsanto, et al. extract that money from the farmers in the form of higher costs for seed, fossil-fuel based fertilizer, and so forth. As the WSJ article notes “Many farm suppliers and equipment dealers held back on price increases in 2006 and 2007…now, after a year or more of strong markets for corn and other crops, those suppliers are deciding farmers can afford to pay more.”

Most American farming has been restructured so that it is completely dependent on inputs provided by corporations. Whereas the traditional farm used seeds from the previous batch of crops, and fertilizer from animals on the farm, the modern extractive farm uses genetically modified seeds provided by a large corporation, and fertilizer derived from fossil fuel. (Of course, the resultant corn mostly goes to feed livestock animals in massive feeding operations, where their manure is not used for crops and instead sometimes becomes so concentrated it poisons the surrounding area). What this means is that the commodity farmers are basically indentured servants taking the value from their land on behalf of their corporate masters. These farmers have no obvious way out of the situation, short of leaving the property their family has worked for generations.

Now that we’ve more or less maximized production of commodity crops, the only way for the agribusiness corporations to increase their growth and shareholder value is for the price per calorie of food to rise. Combined with the Giffen effect, in which higher commodity prices drive demand for that commodity up as fewer dollars are available to spend on more desirable foods, a dramatic rise in the cost of staples has a very beneficial effect for agribusiness, and one they won’t want to see reversed.

This is why there has been such widespread support for ethanol: it helps drive corn prices higher, which in turn drives corn prices higher. And allows the energy, fertilizer, seed and transportation companies to also raise their profits. Everybody has to eat, after all, so it seems unlikely that people will just refuse to pay for processed corn or corn-fed livestock — the basic food items on which our whole economy is based.

Most people don’t believe it can happen any more, but only by a return to integrated farming which renews the earth can we stop, or at least jump off, this mad ferris wheel. Fortunately, the price of commodity food may rise enough now that real food won’t seem like a luxury, but instead will be revealed as a necessity.

This year the Craft Brewers Conference and World Beer Cup are being held simultaneously here in our own Beertown. The World Beer Cup begins this weekend as judges and brewers from 58 countries and 645 breweries gather in San Diego to share their goods. The conference which begins Wednesday and runs through out the week, is a bit more symposiastic.

Speaking of which, The San Diego Brewers Guild and Chuck Silva of Green Flash brewed a San Diego Style IPA called “CBC Symposium”, that all of the participants of the conference will receive. From what I understand the brewers in charge of this one hopped it up in every way imaginable - just so nobody forgets where we are, I suppose. What was left over is now being served around town, a cask of which has landed here! We are really excited to be able to share this with you all. We also have a keg of it, so look for it through out the week.

We will be celebrating the local beer community all week by continuously offering two cask conditioned ales and two drafts. The line up for the casks includes AleSmith X, Green Flash Double Stout, Firestone Pale, and CBC Symposium. Right now we have Pizza Port’s Great American Brown and Coronado’s Red Devil tapped and ready to pump.

If you can’t make it here, be sure to check out your local pub, as some of the best beer in the world will be flowing. More news on what else is being served can be found on the San Diego Brewers Guild website.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the local breweries for continuously releasing great products!

As many of you know, this next week is Craft Brewers Conference and the World Beer Cup, right here in San Diego. You’ll see lots of amazing beers on tap, in bottles, and on cask at all your favorite craft beer establishments.

Here’s the list of what we’ll be rotating through on draft during the week (list and notes both courtesy Steph):

* Craftsman Bier de Mars. Craftsman is a small brewery in Pasadena. Mark, who is the brew master/owner, has a lot of specialty brews that we like to feature when we can. Style is Biere de Garde, which translates to ”beer for keeping”. It originated In the French and Belgian border regions. Biere de Mars is that same style brewed or March. Ours is 7.7 abv, it will come in wine glasses. It is dark brown, some spices, yeasty.

* Moonlight Reality Czech Pils. Moonlight is a small brewery in Sonoma. Kids in San Diego go wild over having this stuff in town because its good and it means that somebody drove to Sonoma, filled up a van with kegs and drove it back. In this case, friends of ours and of Hamilton’s Lisa and Chris went. Brian Hunt is the owner/brewer/deliveryguy/buyer/cellarman/salesman – it’s a one-man-show. The beer is a Czech style pilsner, inspired by a trip he took there a few years back. It’s really light, grassy, and crisp - it will be the lightest thing we have available when we serve it. One thing to note is that Brian is really good at naming brews. He rarely brews traditional styles, and is often weary of calling them such. 4.8 abv, served in glasses.

* Death & Taxes: “The only thing that is certain in life is death and taxes” This is another brew from Moonlight. The style is shwartzbier or black lager. It’s really roasty and has a medium body. There is not much coffee or chocolate flavor, as many stouts and porters have.

* Symposium Beer This is the beer that will be distributed at the Conference to all participants. The San Diego Brewers guild decided on the style and helped Chuck from Green Flash brew it. They filled a 5-gallon keg and a cask of it for us so this will definitely make it on this week. It’s a San Diego IPA, with a lot of different hop quality. They added em in everyway possible and the result is a surprisingly mellow San Diego style Double IPA. It will be more floral forward as opposed to citrus.

* Even Keel Ballast Point’s American Pale Ale. Light and citrus-y. Even Keel is being released this week. It is very light, a session beer if you will, with some nice citrus and lemon notes (as opposed to the symposium as mentioned above).

* Keller Pils, Lightning Brewery. Lightning’s philosophy is “Better Beer through Science”, so their recipies are often true to its style (unlike Moonlight up there). For example, for this brew they have imported pilsner malt and use German hops.

* Firestone Abacus. This won 3rd place at the 2008 Barley wine festival. Its is a blend of 2 of Firestone’s barrel aged beers, the total barrels used for abacus is 4-bourbon, brandy, new American oak, and rye. It’s a barley wine at 11% abv and is a specialty release.

Death and Taxes went on tonite…I guess the week has begun!

Just to remind you slackers that you only have a few days left, we are serving Moonlight’s Death & Taxes on draft starting tonight! Its a really toasty Black Lager with a few fans around town.

Our friends Lisa and Chris drove up to Sonoma and brought us a few kegs from Moonlight along with other treats from up North. Look forward to seeing you all here with a beer and a sigh of relief because you have done your taxes!

Thanks to CAMRA and the writers of the Good Beer Guide West Coast USA, for including us in this new guide book as “highly recommended.” The book is available for purchase here.

My go-to sandwich shop in town just raised their prices quite a bit, due to the increased costs of their goods. This is a reality every food purveyor is facing. Looking at their handwritten sign explaining their need to raise prices, it struck me that perhaps the Butz Age of American life was just a short blip whose ending we are witnessing.

In the 70’s, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, implemented policies (”get big or get out”, “plant fencerow to fencerow”) rewarding maximum cultivation of all land at all times, regardless of the sustainability of such practices. This set into motion the change that characterized US agriculture in the last 40 years: a powerful move toward agribusiness, monoculture farming, the rise of industrial agricultural inputs, and the hastening of the disposession of American family farmers. It also begat a steady supply very, very low-priced commodity food.

This illusion — that we were masters of the land who could extract from it infinite amounts of food — is of course unsustainable. But it is a powerful illusion which led in turn to such cultural madness as the development and subsidy of ethanol: we reckon we can grow so much food, let’s use it to fuel our machines, too. Could it be, one wonders, that the powerful force of ethanol, along with its insatiable demands, are finally tipping the system into overt imbalance?

Before the era of cheap processed goods, our society had some firsthand experience with Giffen goods: A commodity (such as, in our time, processed corn) where increases in price lead to *increased* demand, because the commodity’s higher price means people have less money for more desirable alternative (such as fresh produce). I sense that this has to be happening again for at least some people in our community, if not many. If commodity price trends continue, it will be many.

Meanwhile, our hunger to extract more corn from the soil, and in doing so to enrich certain of ourselves in so doing, continues unabated. This article (courtesy FarmPolicy.com) details the pressure to pull from conservation “35 million acres — 8 percent of the cropland in the country” in order to put the land in service of industrial agriculture.

The article quotes a Baltimore baker as saying “We’re in a crisis here. Do we want to eat, or do we want to worry about the birds?” This said as though we have the technological power and all-knowingness to deploy given land in service either to us or to “nature”: the Butzian ideal.

I’m sure that somewhere within us, we know that if we render the ecosystem in which we live (either our neighborhood or the planet) unfit to sustain birds, it is unlikely to renew our food supply either. On the other hand, if in fact industrial agricultural is actually beginning to dismantle itself — which of course is hard to say if it’s happening now, but it will happen eventually — this represents a great opportunity for us to adopt the wisdom of other methods which had worked in concert with our environment for thousands of years.

Michael Meets a Tamworth

Michael & I just returned from a weekend in Athens, GA, visiting Farm 255 restaurant, and their affiliated biodynamic farm, Full Moon Farm. Farm 255 is a casual farm-to-table restaurant in the center of Athens. Athens is, first and foremost, a college town, and Farm 255 embraces that spirit: live music many nights a week, fairly low pricing, a full range of prices for liquor and beer, a modestly priced wine list, and Sunday brunch.

The restaurant seats about 150 Their kitchen is open and the bar is the physical highlight of the restaurant. The bar and much of the furniture was made by the owners.

The striking thing about this restaurant, that brought us out for a look, is that most of its food — including meat — comes from its own farm, which is a 5-acre biodynamic farm on a 100-acre research plot.

Jason Mann With Very Young Chicks

The project is led by Jason Mann, who is the farmer and a doctoral student in Ecology at UGA. He also (if I have this right) teaches biodynamic farming classes to UGA students and members of the community. Several folks we ran into in Athens had worked a little on the farm or planned to, and were very excited about the project.

Rye used as a cover crop to provide carbon to the soil

Compost for the Tams

Jason (aka Jay) is a Cal grad from San Diego, and while he was in the Bay Area he worked developing a system of urban food gardens in San Francisco. That’s a project we intend to undertake in our area, so of course that was another reason for interest.

We spent our first night touring the restaurant, eating there, and observing its operations. Their food is excellent and unpretentious. We stayed long enough to watch the place transition into a live music club, where the tables and chairs were pushed out, the lights went very dim, the band started up, the place filled up with younger folks, and the beer started being poured in plastic cups. It was pretty amazing for such a high-minded but casual restaurant to be so fun to different crowds at different times of day.

The local Q

Michael outside the local Q

The Full Moon Farm property’s original smokehouse

Michael always takes his photo-ops by the smokehouse

Green Garlic

I ate this seconds after shooting it

The second day we briefly toured Athens, ate some barbecue, and then took an extensive farm tour, with lots of education about the many ecological practices at work in biodynamic farming, and lots of hanging out with charming cows and pigs. Then we made some sausage from the ground pork they have on hand from their farm’s pigs, and Jason cooked a meal made almost entirely with food we had picked that day — asparagus, lettuces, herbs. Needless to say, it was tasty as all get out.

We ate this too, it is Jason’s homemade jowl bacon

We observed a lot of interesting stuff, and much of the little stuff we learned will filter out through our place in the coming months. In the bigger scope, however, it is obvious we have a few key priorities.

1) Solidify supply of the meat we want to serve. This became a real challenge for us when the local processor closed, and we need to better meet it.

Posters from a charrette regarding developing organic agriculture in Georgia

2) Further develop our involvement with local farming. In part, this means continuing to work closely with our existing farm partnerships such as Wingshadows Hacienda. But also we think it’s time for us to begin developing a network of gardens and farms in the midst of our community, both in North Park and beyond.

Fun comes first

3) Bring the Linkery spirit to the people, more broadly than we do now. What really struck us about Farm 255 is that people are coming there for all sorts of
reasons — to see a band, to have a delicious brunch, to try some new bourbon, to have dinner with their family — but over time are exposed to the audacious and uplifting idea that a community can be in touch with its land and its food, and each other. In our current location, our small space has limited us to serving a fairly narrow segment of our community. But we believe that our expansion into our new space will allow to reach out to more people. We plan to offer things like a casual sandwich shop for lunch, additional lower-priced & casual menu items, more session drinks and a comfortable lounge area, and infrastructure to support parents of young children.

Thank you, Jason and everyone we met for your very kind hospitality and for sharing your amazing project with us.

Just a quick note that Meatpaper is fantastic, and anyone who’s interested in the food-culture continuum should make a point to seek it out and enjoy.

Jed Sundwall was nice enough to interview me for his blog, which was flattering, and fun.

In addition to being a really neat guy to talk with about food and business, Jed is a dedicated music aficionado and maintains an excellent MP3 blog.

(An email update in blog post form…)

Hi Friends,

It’s getting to be that time of year, and our farmers are harvesting some great things.

* We are grateful to be awash in pastured chicken eggs from both Wingshadows Hacienda and Fountain of Youth farm, and we are celebrating with an open-faced pastured-chicken-egg salad sandwich, made with house made mayonnaise from the same eggs, house made pickles, and house baked beer bread. You can also get it with house cured pancetta. We served this last nite for the first time, and it was rather well-received. ( http://thelinkery.com/blog/?p=801 )

* Bruce from Wingshadows came by not only with eggs but with bunches of fresh, tasty greens which are anchoring a market salad and also accompanying the egg salad sandwich. (also covered at http://thelinkery.com/blog/?p=801 )

* We’re getting many delicious veggies from Suncoast Farms in Lompoc, including baby asparagus and globe artichokes. Which means, in turn, we have starter dishes both of grilled artichokes and of asparagus soup.

* Housemade whole-wheat grilled flatbread is back, both vegetarian and with meat.

* Look for grassfed beef short ribs (from Jim Neville in San Luis Obispo) starting tomorrow, and pastured pork belly (from Barney Bahrenfuse of Grinnell, Iowa) over the weekend.

* We’re cutting our pastured Berkshire pork chop a little differently so that the massive volume of delicious, creamy, tender, precious Berkshire fat doesn’t overwhelm the moderate amount of less sexy but apparently desirable actual meat. (Did I mention pork fat? Mmmmmm,) By request — you ask and we deliver. Sometimes.

* All Ballast Point beer on cask today (Sextant Oatmeal Stout and Calico Ale).

* I’m indulging my affection for pink wine, even if it’s mocked by some as being unmanly. We’re gonna have lots of roses in house, and y’all are just gonna have to start drinking them (and if you don’t, well, I will). This week it’s a Rose of Pinot Noir from Arroyo Seco in Monterey County, by Radog Wines. It’s a dry rose (i.e., not sugary) but has both fruity and spicy flavor and nice acidity. Generally I like pink wine because they can have the interesting, heavy flavors of red wine while still offering acidity and refreshingness (yes, that is not a word).

OK, anyway, we’re open from 5pm to 11pm every day, and thanks for letting us all being a part of this.

Best,
Jay