Does healthy, organic food cost more than “regular” food? And what’s a hamburger supposed to cost around here, anyway?
Ever since Grazin’ revitalized a formerly-empty restaurant space on Warren Street, one has heard more than a few hyperbolic discussions about prices, with little actual relationship to the reality of the 21st Century cost of delivering a decent meal.
The chart below collects some representative menu prices for burgers in the region. For the purposes of a fair comparison, the price of a side of fries was included if those don’t come automatically with the burger:
As the hard numbers above show, the price of a burger in these parts can range from a low of $5.50 to a high of $13. The average burger price of the 15 establishments list above is $9.98—precisely 3 cents higher than than that of the Grazin’ all-organic, Animal Welfare Certifed burger.
In short, getting a healthy, organic, responsibly-created, locally-sourced, farm-to-table burger is no more expensive than eating at most any other non-fastfood restaurant in the area... which just points up the irrationality of some of the anti-organic voices in our midst. Those who denounce $9-$10 for a burger as outrageous clearly haven’t been getting out much lately.
Now some Rush Limbaugh listeners may cry foul, noting that they could get a slider and fries at McDonald’s or Burger King for even less than any of the prices above. Yes, you could... except those aren’t hamburgers. Those are reprocessed sewage patties masquerading as food. If you eat them regularly, you will almost certainly die early. And the price of that to your family and society far exceeds anything that buying organic ever could.
Stanley Mixon photo, off of 9G between Germantown and Clermont, via the Library of Congress.
Kinderhook resident and Wall Street Journal columnist Ralph Gardner, Jr. has a lively piece in today’s WSJ about Alan Chartock and the WAMC fund drive, at this link.
Patting himself on the back for a job poorly done, Hudson Council President Don Moore awards himself a gold star in the pages of The Register-Star. The achievement of which he’s so proud? Ushering through a sorry excuse of a Waterfront plan, one which doesn't guarantee Hudson any new jobs, or any meaningful environmental protections, or even a realistic new location for a boat launch... The one thing it does guarantee is plenty of headaches for future leaders and residents alike.
If Moore actually believes any of what he’s written, why have few if any of the concerns that he himself raised in his own March 2010 letter been addressed in this plan?
For example, Moore argued last year that if a certain zoning change demanded by Holcim/O&G were made, the City would lose control over its activity, and (in his words) there would be “no longer any restriction” on their South Bay activity.
Yet exactly that change was made for H/OG—with Moore’s apparent blessing—and now he ignores his own warning. Instead, he attempts to place gauzy halo over a Plan that has gotten weaker with each revision that he’s overseen in office.
If the Council President actually believed any of what he has written, he presumably would not have been so afraid to allow any of the 80+ people in the audience who attended the recent “special meeting” on this plan to speak, before rushing it to a vote.
What was he afraid of, exactly? That if the public were allowed to participate, this carefully-manicured veneer of responsibility might be punctured by actual facts— from both citizens and legal experts, who were waiting to speak?
Moore’s Politiburo-style move was un-democratic and un-American no matter what your position is on this plan. It was conduct ill-befitting any Common Council President, and something his precedessors such as Mary Anne Lemmerman, Mike Vertetis and John Cody never stooped to, even in the midst of other controversies.
As to the tissue-thin “substance” of Moore’s commentary, it reveals that he either does not understand his own Plan, or simply does not want to understand it—because to do so would be to require him to show some political mettle. (Moore has been heard many times to make bilious remarks about Linda Mussmann as a public figure, but his current position on the Waterfront is indistinguishable from hers.)
Moore apparently doesn't want to understand that the issue is not whether such activity stems from the cement, or gravel, or some other industry. If it were garbage hauling, or incineration, the concerns would be fundamentally the same, just with slightly different particulars. The public's concerns have been, for years now, the impacts.
Can Moore look the owners of, say, the Basilica, and tell them that a four- or five-fold increase in trucks running all day past the entrance used by their patrons and workers is not new "industrialization"? Can he tell us that the dust and fumes and noise from such a major increase is not further "industrialization" of the dock area, with no impact on neighbors trying to enjoy the publicly-funded park next door? (If he can, then he is sadly self-deluded, because such impacts have not even been assessed in the shoddy Generic Environmental Impact Statement associated with the Plan, and would likely never be assessed in the future he extolls.)
As a State attorney at the meeting said, as currently constructed the City would not be able to place limits on either trucks or the volume of gravel at the Waterfront. If that is not heavy "industrialization," what is? When attorney was asked after the meeting if Holcim were to increase the amount to the levels of the SLC Greenport Project, could that be limited or stopped under the current Plan, he could not say that it would.
The hard facts are that Holcim and O&G have estimated in a various applications that they intend to increase existing activity from the current baseline 100-130,000 tons per year to 500,000 tons per year, some 4-5 times the current amount. In 2005, the amount was zero. That is a massive increase in industrial impacts by any measure: many more trucks, many more barges, many more rail crossings, much more noise, and much more fugitive dust and fumes wafting over the Waterfront Park.
Yet the latest version of Moore's vaunted plan actually makes it harder to do anything about the industrial impacts, not just to the environment, but to neighboring businesses and public resources. Future Zoning Enforcement officers and future members of the Planning Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, or Coastal Consistency Board would have neither clarity nor many tools to deal with an ever-escalating situation.
What are the effects of trucks, or a conveyor, or diesel fumes, or fuel spills, or constant barge traffic? How are neighboring businesses or public activities (from kayaking to concerts) or habitats limited or made impossible by severe nearby impacts? Since the 1970s, local and State and even Federal planners have recognized that Hudson's waterfront is very small, and produces "use conflicts" of this kind. Moore prefers instead to stick his head in the mud and pretend that he is not rushing ahead with a plan that gives the City few real controls over these very real concerns.
At the Valley Alliance website, you can see that the group has sent an authoritative legal memorandum detailing the issues with this plan, as well as 24 pages summarizing continued citizen concerns. The Register-Star and Columbia Paper have been provided with both.
Via the “always interesting” Shorpy.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
— FREDERICK DOUGLASS (WEST INDIA EMANCIPATION SPEECH, 1857)
The Gossips of Rivertown reports that faux-Democrat Rick Scalera—who has previously been a member of virtually every other major party—has endorsed Republican mayoral candidate Bill Hallenbeck in the 2011 cycle. This news should come as a surprise only to Hudson political neophytes, and to those with a deep-seated Panglossian need to believe in the redeemability of scoundrels.
Scalera has endorsed mayoral candidates before, with weak results. In both 1999 and 2005, Scalera attempted to anoint a successor. The recipient of his 1999endorsement, Cappy Pierro, lost. His 2005 choice, Dan Grandinetti, also lost. (In both years, I was “accused” of being their opponents’ “campaign manager.”)
Scalera had decided not to run for Mayor in each of those two cycles. Controversy dogged him, and he probably calculated he would lose a Citywide race. So in ’99 Scalera tried instead for 5th Ward Supervisor, losing badly to Kathy Nabozny, by a whopping 507-310 on the machine.
Then in 2005, Scalera again lost a non-Citywide race, this time in a primary for 5th Ward committeemen to none other than Peter Jung.
Yet now Scalera is being allowed by all parties to run unopposed for Supervisor in the 5th Ward. People with little historical memory have wrongly assumed he was unbeatable there. Per above, both times he ran for office in his home ward, the 5th, Scalera lost.
(The 5th Ward has changed more dramatically than any of Hudson’s wards. The total number of voters has dipped about 3% since 1999, but the big change there is in party affiliation. Democratic registration has jumped +60%, from 321 voters to 515 voters, while Republicans enrollment has dipped -24%, down to 263 from 344.)
Some City and County Democratic insiders have been twisting themselves into political pretzels to convince themselves that Rick Scalera, once he sails into a Supervisor seat unopposed, should become the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors. Their thinking is that any Democrat is better than a Republican—even if that Democrat is a former Conservative who's well to the right of Mitt Romney. In these mental gymnastic exercises paper-thin party affiliation trumps actual ideology or policy.
But now that Scalera has endorsed a Republican for mayor, over the Dem nominee, how long can the Yellow Dog Dems maintain that illusion? Meanwhile, Hallenbeck’s opponent, Nick Haddad, has been endorsed by prominent City Democrats such as City Treasurer Eileen Halloran and 4th Ward Supervisor William Hughes. Whether such endorsements cancel each other out, or if voters pay much attention to those endorsements, will of course be seen in November.
Click on the thumbnails to see work by Stef-Albert Bothma, Lee Musselman, Kenny Smith, Laetitia Hussain, Iris Eicheberg, David Dew Bruner, Kris Perry and Ieva Medodia... Click again on each larger image to see it at twice the size.
The Goergen family’s Schneid Bakery, via the “always interesting” Shorpy.
