Saturday, May 30, 2015

King Salmon: Is the Drought Threatening California’s Favorite Fish?

California salmon lovers spend a good part of the year waiting for summer, which normally heralds the return of our wild king salmon, aka the Chinook. But so far, the season (which opened on May 1) has gotten off to a slow start and been mostly disappointing. What’s in store for our beloved California salmon?

Santa Cruz fishmonger Hans Haveman of H & H Fresh Fish Co. is optimistic that the season will improve but fears for salmon’s future. Warmer river temperatures and four years of drought have taken their toll on king salmon populations, and we’ll be feeling those dramatic impacts in the coming years. Wildlife agencies have resorted to extreme measures to protect the next generation, such as installing water chillers and trucking young hatchery salmon downstream to bypass dried-up riverbeds.

With the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch as his guide, Hans sells locally caught seafood at farmers markets throughout the Bay Area as well as through wholesale and a CSS (community-supported seafood) program. We talked with Hans about the future of the king and the state of sustainable seafood in California.

CUESA: What’s happening with king salmon this season?

Hans and Heidi photo courtesy of H & H Fresh Fish Co.
Hans and Heidi photo courtesy of H & H Fresh Fish Co.

Hans Haveman: It was kind of a dismal opener. There were practically no fish around. Our first couple markets we only had a little bit of fish. But last weekend we had more than enough. It’s still up to Mother Nature. There’s a 10-day closure on the California coast at the beginning of June to protect a certain summer run. During those days, I should be able to get some fish down from Oregon. I’ll do my best to make sure we have king through the rest of the summer.

CUESA: Has fishing this season been affected by the drought?

HH: It’s not the drought, but it’s definitely some strange weather-related issues and ocean conditions. There’s a lot of warm water this year, which makes the fish harder to catch because they’re not concentrating in the areas that they normally do.

But I think this year is going to be a decent season. The biggest impact is there’s not a lot of fish to be caught, and it’s a supply-and-demand situation. Everybody wants this fish now. People all over the US have learned that the California king is one of the best out there. Demand keeps the price up at the boats, which translates to $25 or $30 a pound at the store.

The next few years will be the first years that the drought will affect the fish in the ocean. We don’t yet know how many fish reproduced in the rivers and how many fish will make it back.

CUESA: Can you explain a bit about how the drought affects the salmon’s lifecycle?

HH: The fish go up the river and spawn, and the baby salmon grow into smolts and work their way down to the ocean within a year or two. They spend five or six years in the ocean, and then they go back up the river they were born in to spawn again and die. If there’s no water, they can’t swim downstream to the ocean or back upstream to reproduce. We’re affected by the water conditions from five or six years ago. Next year will be the fifth year of drought, so we’ll be seeing the effects in the next few years. There’s a good chance the regulators will completely shut the fishery down.

CUESA: What’s driving up the cost of salmon right now?

HH: The main challenge is getting the fish from the fishermen. There’s not a lot we can fish for because of regulation. That’s the problem with sustainable seafood that no one really talks about. I get calls almost weekly from big companies asking to buy every bit of sustainable seafood I have because there’s such a demand. There was a time when I could sell my salmon for $8 or $9 a pound, and people could have a BBQ. Now they can only eat it on their birthdays.

I’ve been doing this so long that I have a really good fleet of small boat fishermen that I’m able pay a higher price, and they in turn bring the fish to me. The price to the fishermen this year is the most I’ve ever paid for salmon, $9 a pound for whole fish. I only get 50% yield, so I’ve got $18 into a piece of salmon before it even gets to market, plus I’ve got labor, insurance, health department, and other costs. There are so many people after this fish now that if I don’t give the fishermen the highest price, they go to the next person. It is a wild product and it is seasonal, which makes it difficult to source.

CUESA: You aim to source all of your seafood locally and sustainably. What are some of the challenges you face as a fishmonger?

HH: California regulations are extremely tight. You can guarantee you’re eating a sustainable piece of fish if it was caught in California. It’s a very well regulated fishery.

That also limits what sustainable fish sellers can get. I bring everything that I can get my hands on from our local waters. Beyond that I try to stay on the West Coast: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, sometimes Canada. We’re not like an average fish market that you can walk into and buy seafood from all over the world. We’re sticking to sustainability guidelines. We do our best to get stuff from within 100 miles of the farmers market. Sometimes I’m at 90% of that in the summertime. I’m reaching out a little bit farther in order to bring some fish that people demand, like ahi tuna from Hawaii.

Fish has become a really hard resource to sell at farmers markets because it’s gotten really expensive. There’s also chicken, beef, and other proteins, all sustainably done. It used to be just fish at most farmers markets. I’ve been in the business doing farmers markets for 13 years, and I’ve had to really expand to make a living.

CUESA: What are some local and sustainable alternatives to salmon this season?

HH: Pacific halibut and white seabass will be coming in, as well as black cod and rockfish. I have a couple trawlers here that are fishing for petrale and English sole. There’s been a lot of lingcod this year, which is all hook-and-line caught off of a tiny boat. There’s always something in season.

There are casual farmers market shoppers, and there are the shoppers who really want to know where their food comes from. That’s the most fun part for us. A lot of people who work for me were or are commercial fishermen. We can answer any questions. A good fishmonger helps people determine what’s sustainable.

Look for H & H Fresh Fish Co. at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in the south driveway on Saturdays. For questions or to place an order for pickup at the market, visit www.hhfreshfish.com or contact Hans or Heidi (his wife and partner) at info@hhfreshfish.com or 831.461.1576.

Looking for salmon recipes? Visit the CUESA recipe archive.

Sprigg: Damn Gay People ‘Attacking’ Country That Wants to Imprison Them

Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, does a perfectly Orwellian spin job, claiming that Uganda is being “bitterly attacked” by gay people for the mere fact that they think gay people should be thrown in prison (or worse).

So it came as no surprise that on yesterday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” FRC senior fellow Peter Sprigg — who once called for the U.S. to “ export homosexuals” — criticized Randy Berry, the Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons, for reportedly traveling to travel to Uganda and Jamaica, where homosexuality is also criminalized.

Sprigg said that Berry and the Obama administration are trying to “force this American-style homosexual agenda down the throats of other countries” such as Uganda, “which is one of the countries which has been most bitterly attacked by homosexual activists around the world.”

Only on Planet Wingnuttia could someone declare that a country that has a law throwing gay people in jail and regularly has witch hunts to round them up to be the victims of “bitter attacks” by the people they routinely victimize. Peter Sprigg in 1860: “Slaveowners are being bitterly attacked by black people, who are trying to shove racial equality down their throats.”

Friday, May 29, 2015

Rafael Cruz Goes Full Godwin Again

When is the media going to start demanding that Ted Cruz either defend or repudiate the bizarre and extremist things his father is saying on a daily basis? He is intimately tied to his son, his speaking engagements are booked by the senator’s office. Especially when he goes full Godwin.

Cruz, the father and top campaign surrogate of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, warned that “if this decision comes against the biblical definition of marriage, the next thing that is going to happen is the government is going to come demanding that churches hire homosexual pastors and churches perform homosexual marriages. It is a very critical time in America.”

Likening the silence of Christians in the face of impending gay marriage doom to the silence of German citizens in Nazi Germany, Cruz asked, “How long are we going to remain silent? Or perhaps the more important question is are we going to have to answer to God for our silence? You know, silence is not an option.” Quoting German pastor and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cruz reminded his audience that “silence in the face of evil is evil itself…not to speak, is to speak. See, the silence sends the message loud and clear. We can’t afford to be silent anymore.”

This whole comparison is just so perverse. It’s Cruz that is in favor of denying equal rights, not advocates of same-sex marriage.

God Gives Us Free Will. Except When He Doesn’t.

I’m really quite fascinated by how some Christians use free will as an excuse to get out of the problem of evil, then suddenly jettison it when it comes to prayer and God punishing us. Richard Land offers up a textbook example of what I’m talking about.

Land, who once called President Obama “a judgment of God on the United States,” said that just as God heaped His judgment upon the nation of Israel, so too is He willing to punish America and is, in fact, doing so right now.

“I believe He is judging the United States of America,” Land said. “I don’t believe that you can kill 56 million babies in child sacrifice through abortion and not expect that God won’t judge the nation. I believe we’re in the state we’re in today because of the judgment of God. I get asked all the time, ‘Where is the next Abraham Lincoln? Where is the next Ronald Reagan? Where is the next Billy Graham?’ Well, my answer is great political and spiritual leadership in our country is a sign of God’s blessing; its absence is a sign of God’s judgment.”

So how does that work, exactly? Did God change the minds of a bunch of voters to get Obama into office as his punishment? If so, doesn’t that destroy the whole idea of Christian free will? Are there great leaders out there that could turn things around, but God is making sure something happens to them so they can’t win and thereby disrupt his punishment plans?

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Texas Totally Falls for Flooding Ruse

Man, people in Texas are so gullible. They foolishly think that all that flooding going on is naturally caused and are totally falling for President Obama’s generous offer of help from FEMA to aid in their recovery from what has become a major natural disaster.

President Obama said Tuesday he spoke to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and pledged federal assistance to help the state recover from catastrophic flooding.

“I assured Gov. Abbott that he could count on the help of the federal government,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office. “I will anticipate that there will be some significant requests made to Washington. My pledge to him is that we will expedite those requests.”

Oh come on, Texas, really? You can’t see that you’re being conned? Those floods aren’t natural, they were caused by Obama’s chemtrail weather-changing machine. It’s all part of Operation Saul Alinsky, a plot to weaken the resolve of patriotic Texans into allowing federal personnel into the state, who will then round them up and send them to those FEMA concentration camps. Then they’ll be replaced by illegal immigrants and members of ISIS, who have undergone plastic surgery at a secret facility owned by George Soros so they look just like the people they’re replacing.

Obama has been hiding all those millions of new citizens in America’s national parks, where no one would ever notice them. They’ve all been trained to act like Real Americans, complete with AR-15s and pickup trucks with gun racks, but soon enough they’ll go about the business of seizing all the guns in the country and forcing Christians to get gay married.

And you dolts fell for it hook, line and sinker! It’s the oldest trick in the book. Glenn Beck will be along soon to pull out his trusty blackboard and remind you that he warned you all about it 5 years ago when he said, “Mark my words, bad things are going to happen.” But did you listen? Nooooooo. You’ll have plenty of time to think about how naive you were in those secret FEMA camps.

Din Promises Restaurant-Quality Dishes at Home — in 20 Minutes

The box arrived as promised on a Thursday. It was a regular-sized one, with three letters on it: “Din,” heralding the arrival of ingredients for two restaurant-quality meals I would be able to produce in my own kitchen in the next few days.

While meal delivery options continue to expand at a rapid pace, the Din concept jumped out at me as something different. My husband and I love eating out at restaurants. And I also love to cook a stellar meal at home myself. The idea of being able to produce a restaurant-quality dish in 20 minutes at home sounded too fun not to try.

Dinner waiting on your doorstep.
Dinner waiting on your doorstep. (Alix Wall)

The restaurant angle is indeed what makes Din unique, said Emily Olson LaFave, Din’s co-founder and chief creative officer, noting that Din is like having your own personal sous chef.

“We are partnering with restaurants, and we have a team of in-house chefs who come from restaurants like Quince, Nopa and Cyrus,” she said. “We do the prep work, so just as in a restaurant, it speeds up the cooking time. It also allows for a better dish with more flavor, as a lot of things that take time to develop flavor are too much time for the home cook to do.”

Rob and Emily LaFave founded Foodzie, and now they’ve founded Din.
Rob and Emily LaFave founded Foodzie, and now they’ve founded Din. (Photo courtesy of Din)

LaFave and her husband Rob were the founders of Foodzie, an online marketplace for artisanal foods. Din is their latest start-up, which they hope will empower people to cook more often at home, as well as acquire new techniques that they’ll hopefully use again.

Restaurants that have offered dishes so far include Bar Tartine, Tacolicious and Alta CA, as well as some farther afield, like Hog & Hominy in Memphis.

“And sometimes we take inspiration from a dish we’ve seen, and our chefs riff on that,” LaFave said, noting that many of their dishes also come from their in-house team of chefs.

LaFave said they see their typical customer as people who are passionate about food, and love restaurants and restaurant culture. As for whether they already cook at home, so far it’s a mix between those who cook quite a bit already, and those who are just beginners.

Noting that it’s usually one person who’s responsible for planning, shopping and putting dinner on the table in a household, LaFave said subscribing to Din changes that since anyone in the household can put the meal together.

A bag in the fridge from Din contains all the ingredients for one entrée.
A bag in the fridge from Din contains all the ingredients for one entrée. (Alix Wall)

“Couples or families can cook together, or a child can even do it,” she said. “We’re taking away that daunting part of planning by having that meal waiting in the fridge in that bag with everything inside. We’re equalizing the role of putting dinner on the table, by taking the pressure off one person. Simplifying that one thing in your day can have a big impact on your family relationships and connections, which is really meaningful for us.”

This is how the chicken entrée looked on Din’s website.
This is how the chicken entrée looked on Din’s website. (Photo courtesy of Din)

That all sounds great, but let’s talk about the Din experience. I enlisted my husband and another couple to weigh in on the experience with me. I ordered two dishes from a list of six choices, though Din chooses two for you, and you can change them if you prefer something else. Din uses organic and sustainable ingredients, and always has vegetarian and gluten-free options. Two servings of two dishes is the minimum order, which costs $60, or $15 a serving, and the service is intended to be used each week (more meals and entrees can be added).

If you live in San Francisco, your meal is dropped off by courier in a white insulated tote; if you’re further out – they deliver throughout California and Nevada so far – your meals come in the tote inside a cardboard box with insulated bubble wrap along with several “ecogel” packs to keep the food cold. LaFave said couriers pick up the totes in the city, but that subscribers outside the city can return all of the packaging with every five orders.

“That was definitely something that we took into account when we initially designed the experience,” said LaFave.

I ordered a farinata – a chick pea flour pancake from northern Italy that is known as a socca in France – that came with braised artichoke hearts, Crescenza cheese, kale pesto, pepitas and fresh herbs and lemon to make a small herb salad on top. The recipe came from the Santa Cruz restaurant Bantam. My second choice was a crispy chicken that had been cooked sous vide served with escarole and Tokyo turnips on a bed of cashew “cheese,” with sherry-soaked currants. Sesame seeds and sumac were also included to sprinkle on top, with a lime to squeeze over the completed dish. This dish was created by Din’s own team.

Each entree comes in its own paper bag, with a label telling you how long the ingredients will last (ours was delivered on a Thursday, and the contents would be good through Sunday), with each individual ingredient in a plastic bag or loose, like a lemon or garlic clove.

With each item coming in its own bag, we wondered why all the produce, for example, couldn’t be bagged together. We also wondered if the sauces and pre-made items could be shipped in containers that could also be sent back to the company, but then of course, that increases the amount needed to be shipped. Either way, this is a resource-heavy experience.

Here are the ingredients after prepping, just before firing the dishes. It did take us more than 20 minutes per dish.
Here are the ingredients after prepping, just before firing the dishes. It did take us more than 20 minutes per dish. (Alix Wall)

The prep work entailed mincing garlic, slicing a shallot and plucking herbs, while the cooking required us to make the farinata (mix chick pea flour and water in a bowl, sauté garlic, add garlic to batter, put batter into skillet and then oven) and sear the chicken.

Overall, we found the quality of the food excellent – we especially liked how we had to only sear the chicken, but had the sous vide experience at home, without our own sous vide machine – and recipes were easy to follow, so we had no problems with execution, though it did take longer than the 20 minutes per dish advertised. While we liked receiving one garlic clove and just enough herbs for what we needed, we found amounts of a few items excessive; in our case it was an excess of Crescenza cheese (a very creamy Italian fresh variety) and sherry-soaked currants. We had no problem using the rest of the cheese for something else, but didn’t know what to do with the currants and they ended up going to waste.

Also, a few leaves of fresh oregano had already turned black.

he farinata as it was shown on the Din web site.
The farinata as it was shown on the Din web site. (Photo courtesy of Din)
Farinata: our version.
Farinata: our version. (Alix Wall)

As both my friend and I cook a lot at home already, we saw it as more of an indulgence as opposed to something we’d do weekly (the Din system delivers to you weekly as long as your account is active, unless you choose to skip a week or two). But we could see Din’s appeal for families with kids to get restaurant-quality meals without having to pay the babysitter, or for those people who don’t know much about cooking but want to impress someone with a home-cooked meal. And having the money and time is essential, of course, as while the cooking time is supposed to take only 20 minutes, of course there is still the clean up time to consider.

One guest compared the experience to hiring sherpas to help you climb Mount Everest.

And while browsing their menus I continually found things I’d want to eat, I found many of the dishes too rich for a regular meal at home.

My favorite thing about the experience was that I didn’t realize how easy it was to make a farinata myself. I liked how it taught me a recipe for something quick and easy enough that I can add to my repertoire, which is exactly what LaFave wanted to hear.

“Ultimately, we hope that the take-away for someone is ‘I can do that on my own,’” she said, “which will make you cook more often and do it from scratch when you have the time.”

Rafael Cruz: Gay Marriage = Slavery

Rafael Cruz, father of Ted, continues his national How to Embarrass My Son Tour by declaring that if the Supreme Court upholds the right of gay couples to get married, it will be the death of religious liberty and — get this — will mean that we’re all slaves.

The gay marriage case at the Supreme Court, he claimed, “is not about homosexual marriage, it’s about religious freedom. Because if the Court rules that homosexual marriage is a right, mark my words, the next thing will be going to a church and saying ‘you must perform homosexual marriage, or we’ll put you in jail’ or ‘you must hire a homosexual pastor, or we’ll put you in jail.’”

Cruz added that marriage isn’t necessary for gay and lesbian couples since civil unions — which his son has fought against — are legal in a number of places.

This attack on religion, concluded Cruz, is an attack on the liberty of conservative Christians and “of course, if you don’t have liberty, you’re a slave and if you’re a slave, you can’t pursue happiness.”

Wait, I thought Obamacare was the worst thing since slavery, not gay marriage. I can’t keep up with all this ridiculous rhetoric.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Another Sheriff Drunk on Power

What is it with some county sheriffs in this country? From Joe Arpaio to Richard Mack, some of these people seem to think that they’re all-powerful and untouchable. Here’s another example, a sheriff in North Carolina who keeps arresting people trying to serve him with a subpoena to testify in a police brutality case.

A judge granted a temporary restraining order against Lee County Sheriff Tracy Carter preventing the three-term Republican and his deputies from interfering with attempts to serve subpoenas in the lawsuit filed five years ago.

U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle found in his order that Carter and other members of the sheriff’s department were “obstructing or otherwise interfering” with attempts to call witnesses in the trial, which is scheduled to start June 2.

Robert Wade was hired to serve a subpoena to Carter at his home, but the 71-year-old man said the sheriff yelled at him and blocked him from leaving until deputies arrived to arrest him.

Wade was charged with trespassing and carrying a concealed weapon…

His attorney said there was no way to ensure that Carter and other key witnesses would testify unless they were served with subpoenas.

“In the environment we live in now where police are under scrutiny for acting out and misbehaving you would think that a sheriff in North Carolina would comply with the law and accept simple service of a piece of paper,” said attorney Kieran Shanahan.

That’s a sheriff who should be out of a job for abusing his power.

Clever Ways to Organize Books

A bookworm’s home is a cozy one, filled to the brim with nonfiction and fiction titles in every nook and cranny. However, that often means that your ever-growing book collection feels like it’s taking over your house, with no real place to store it. Before you invest in yet another bookshelf, check out these creative tips for organizing your books.

  1. Declutter. Like with most organization efforts, the first step is ridding your book collection of clutter. Donate books that you haven’t looked at in years and start fresh with only the ones you really love.
  2. Choose a style of organization. Next, decide which type of book organization makes the most sense for you. Fiction and nonfiction? Alphabetically? By author? No matter which way you choose, it’s bound to make finding your books much easier.
  3. Place books on shelves. Once you decide on how to catalog your books, place them back on the shelves with the titles all facing in the same direction and the spines facing outward.
  4. Add some interest. To make your bookshelves look more visually appealing, intersperse your titles with stacks of books arranged vertically rather than horizontally. Add some pretty bookends, or even organize books by color for a designer-inspired look.
  5. Branch out. Don’t feel confined to bookshelves. Stack your books on coffee tables, on ledges or even across windowsills for a unique storage solution.

Easy Organizing: Tips for Books and Home Library [Good Housekeeping]
How To Organize Books [Home Storage Solutions]
Unique Ways to Organize Books [PopSugar]

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Rosenberg: God is Going to Destroy America Over Abortion

The Family Research Council’s annual Watchmen on the Wall conference always attracts a mix of Republican politicians and bigoted and simpleminded Christian right ranters. This year, Joel Rosenberg declared that God is going to destroy America over abortion in the next two years and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

“My friends, we are not in a season of decline,” he declared. “I argue to you that judgment is coming. In another couple of years, if this doesn’t stop, we will hit 60 million abortions. If we hit 60 million abortions, we as Americans will have murdered 10 times more human beings than the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis. We know the judgment that fell on Nazi Germany, the devastation. We believe it was justified. My friends, what do we think is going to happen to a nation that murders 10 times more people? Judgment is coming and there’s no way out. The train has left the station.”

He added that the “only hope at this point” would be a third Great Awakening, in which case God might delay his judgment as Americans “make reforms based on the word of God.”

It’s really kind of incredible that America is still here, given all the times wingnuts have predicted that God is going to destroy us because of [insert whatever they don’t like at any given moment]. I mean, this goes all the way back to the founding of the country. At the time of the Constitution, many prominent preachers opposed the Constitution because it did not contain any “Christian nation” language and said that this would bring God’s wrath down upon us all.

We should have been destroyed a thousand times by now. That we haven’t been suggests several possibilities:

1. Those people are completely full of shit.

2. Their god doesn’t exist.

3. Their god doesn’t care about the things they think he cares about.

4. He has really shitty aim and keeps taking out other countries when he’s trying to destroy this one.

5. He’s like George W. Bush and intentionally attacks other countries to punish them for the things they didn’t do.

Take your pick.

Is the ‘Benedict Option’ a Real Possibility?

Damon Linker, a writer I rarely take seriously, has a long and interesting article about the Benedict Option, which is apparently now under discussion among the Christian right. The basic idea is that Christian conservatives should withdraw from the culture wars and focus on building “communities” (you’ll see why I put that in quotes later) that help preserve themselves ideologically.

Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.

It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage…

Before the present moment, the one flicker of genuine gloom came in 1996, after a series of court rulings seemed to signal that secular liberalism was using the judiciary to thwart the will of the people. That inspired the conservative religious magazine First Things (for which I later worked) to run a notorious symposium titled “The End of Democracy?” An unsigned editorial introducing the symposium suggested that religious Americans would soon have to decide on options ranging “from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”

The incendiary rhetoric sparked a firestorm among conservatives, but it’s important to recognize that it followed directly from the most fundamental premises of the religious right. If it was in fact true that social conservatives were the American majority, and if it was also the case that the judicial branch of government was actively and undemocratically impeding the majority, then it did indeed follow that religious conservatives were faced with (as the editorial put it) “the prospect — some might say the present reality — of despotism” in the United States. And that called for a radical, perhaps revolutionary, response.

Gosh, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Now the pessimism is back — though with a twist. The mood among social conservatives has been darkening for years, as a liberal Democrat has taken and held the White House, as the Republican Party has placed greater emphasis on economic concerns than culture-war issues, and (most of all) as same-sex marriage has come to be accepted by more than half of the country and Democrats have begun to embrace it without apology.

But nothing compares to the gloom that’s set in during the weeks since the passage of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act sparked a rapid and widespread condemnation of religious traditionalists, not only by gay activists and liberal Democrats, but also by a number of Republicans with national stature and high-profile members of the business community. Suddenly social conservatives began to think the unthinkable: Is it possible that we’re now in the minority, with our freedoms subject to the whims of a hostile majority that will use the power of the modern liberal state (especially anti-discrimination laws) to enforce public conformity to secular, anti-Christian norms?

That’s where the Benedict Option comes in.

Conservative blogger Rod Dreher (a friend) has been writing about it for years, though with rapidly increasing intensity over the past few months. The idea was inspired by the famous concluding paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue, in which the conservative philosopher wrote about waiting “for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict,” who, like the founder of Western monasticism during the waning days of the decadent and declining Roman Empire, would help to construct “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages.”

In Dreher’s hands, this haunting image has become the Benedict Option — the idea of traditionalist Christians choosing to step back from the now-futile political projects and ambitions of the past four decades to cultivate and preserve a robustly Christian subculture within an increasingly hostile common culture. That inward turn toward community-building is the element of monasticism in the project. But its participants won’t be monks. They will be families, parishes, and churches working to protect themselves from the acids of modernity, skepticism, and freedom (understood as personal autonomy), as well as from the expansive regulatory power of the secular state.

Over the past couple of years, but especially since the RFRA conflagration, this idea has caught on among social conservative intellectuals, especially those in the circles around The American Conservative and First Things. And it makes perfect sense that it would. After all, if social conservatives are indeed a minority in a hostile secular culture, and if they have therefore lost any reasonable hope of gaining and wielding political power, then cultivating and preserving the faith would certainly seem to be a pressing priority — perhaps the most pressing one of all.

But it’s quite unclear what this means. What does it mean to build a “robustly Christian subculture” or a “community”? If it means an actual municipality, they’re going to run into the same problem. Under the 14th Amendment, state and local governments are as forbidden from violating the rights of individuals to the same extent the federal government is. Tom Monaghan found that out when he tried to create a Catholic city in Florida, complete with a ban on selling contraception or selling or renting videos that offend his delicate sensibilities. People are, of course, free to choose to live their lives according to the dictates of their religious beliefs, but only so long as doing so does not violate the right of other people not to live their lives in that manner.

It’s not clear what else this Benedict Option might be referring to. If it only means a voluntary community of like-minded people who seek to live religiously but not impose those beliefs legally, they already have those. They’re called churches. Of course, I’d be more than happy if the Christian right would withdraw from politics and concede that they’ve lost the culture wars. That’s a prediction I certainly hope will prove true.

Huckabee Still Doesn’t Get Judicial Review

On Sunday, Mike Huckabee went on Fox News and Chris Wallace asked him, as he did last week with Ben Carson, about his claim that both state and federal officials are free to ignore the Supreme Court if they rule in favor of marriage equality next month. He offered up the usual gibberish:

Huckabee has said he would not follow a high court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, a matter the Court is expected to decide on imminently.

“Judicial review is exactly what we have lived under; we have not lived under judicial supremacy,” Huckabee said. “The Supreme Court can’t make a law; the legislature has to make it, the executive has to sign it and enforce it. The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with a ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is to equal branches of government.”

So how do you tell when it’s “judicial review” and when it’s “judicial supremacy”? Easy. If you agree with the ruling, it’s judicial review; if you don’t, it’s judicial supremacy. Can you imagine if President Obama had responded to the Hobby Lobby ruling by saying, “The Supreme Court can’t make a law; the legislature has to make it, the executive has to sign it and enforce it. The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with a ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is to equal branches of government” — and then continued to enforce the contraception mandate? Huckabee’s head would have exploded as he screamed TYRANNY! DICTATORSHIP! OBAMA IS DESTROYING AMERICA! HE’S COMMITTING EXECUTIVE TERRORISM!

There is no serious argument here, it’s just special pleading — if the Supreme Court agrees with us, we must follow it. If they don’t, that’s judicial tyranny and we must refuse to follow it.

Oh, How I Love Larry Klayman

If Larry Klayman didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him. The volume of stupidity and psychological projection he pumps out is simply extraordinary. In his latest column he says we should move the Supreme Court to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. This is the first paragraph of that column:

As I head to my native city and birthplace of Philadelphia to visit with my family and pay my respects to the place where our nation was born at the cost of many lives this Memorial Day, it caused me to think about the state of affairs in our legal system. Of course, you know me well enough to understand my general lack of respect for many judges and lawyers who infest the courthouses around the country. The former are mostly political hacks, chosen either through presidential and senatorial patronage, as is the case in the federal system, or elected thanks to large contributions from big law firms, labor unions and special interests, as is true in most states. In short, the legal profession doesn’t even come close to living up to the high ethical and competency standards envisioned by our Founding Fathers when our Declaration of Independence and later Constitution were conceived of and signed in the City of Brotherly Love.

Yes, my friends, Larry Klayman just criticized other people for their lack of “high ethical and competency standards.” Let’s judge him by those same standards:

1. He’s been reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court for taking a $25,000 retainer from a woman and then not doing any legal work for her. He was ordered to pay back the money but he said he was dead broke and couldn’t afford to do so.

2. He sued his own mother, seeking to get back $50,000 he had paid for private nurses for his grandmother while she was very ill (she’s since passed away).

3. His law license is suspended in Pennsylvania.

4. Last year he was publicly censured by the Office of Bar Counsel in Washington, DC.

5. Multiple judges have hammered Klayman for failing to turn over documents as ordered, failing to file pleadings with the court in a timely manner. One court sanctioned him in a lawsuit he filed against Judicial Watch, the organization he founded, saying:

“The court concludes that the requested sanction is appropriate under the unique circumstances presented in this case – most notably, Klayman’s consistent pattern of engaging in dilatory tactics, his disobedience of court-ordered deadlines, and his disregard for the federal rules of civil procedure and the local rules of this court, coupled with the patent failure of the court’s use of lesser sanctions in the past to have any discernible effect on Klayman’s conduct in this litigation,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

6. At least two judges have barred him from ever appearing in their courtrooms again.

7. He rarely wins the staggering number of lawsuits he’s filed.

Of course, all of this is just part of a grand conspiracy against him. That’s always his answer. No matter how unethical or incompetent he clearly is, every time he’s nailed for it he claims that it’s all just a result of bias against him. “High ethical and competency standards,” indeed.

Monday, May 25, 2015

The Plantpower Way to a Vegan Diet for the 21st Century

According to The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, two billion of the world’s population survives on a meat-based diet, which, given the amount of land, water and energy involved in meat production, requires more resources than we ultimately have. Meanwhile, four billion of the world’s human inhabitants currently survive mostly on plants. Frances Moore Lappé told us all about this in her groundbreaking 1971 book, Diet For a Small Planet.

In the just-released cookbook and lifestyle guide The Plantpower Way, Rich Roll and Julie Piatt are telling us again, throwing in vegan recipes that are so beautiful and delicious that you might forget to miss the meat — and the cheese, eggs, and milk, for that matter. (Some recipes do contain honey, which hardcore vegans don’t eat; Roll and Piatt think of it as an important nutrient, and they often recommend it as a sweetener.)

The Plantpower Way by Rich Roll and Julie Piatt
The Plantpower Way by Rich Roll and Julie Piatt (Maclay Heriot and Gunny Guzman)

Roll’s story is a compelling one. After a decade of struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol, he had managed to get sober in time for his fortieth birthday, but was 50 pounds overweight and going up a flight of stairs was a challenge. The proverbial epiphany that often accompanies mid-life crises translated, for Roll, into a life overhaul, complete with strict veganism and a training regimen that would lead him to compete in triathlons. Two years later and 50 pounds lighter, he became the first vegan to complete the Ultraman 320-mile über-endurance event, even finishing in the top ten, despite being a novice at such feats of endurance. Needless to say, he’s become the poster child for plant-fueled athleticism, and The Plantpower Way shares approaches to experiment with different “paths,” as Roll calls them, to plant-based eating.

The book is co-authored by Piatt, Roll’s wife, a yogi, writer and chef herself, who also credits her optimal health to a vegan diet and is the driver of the recipes that make the whole shebang so appealing.

Organized by category, rather than meal (with the exception of a section on “Breakfast & Brunch”), the book offers an easy foray into the genre, starting with “Blends & Juices,” which are not to be confused. Blends are nutrient-dense combinations of foods that act more like a meal, whereas juices are more like medicine, with most of the fiber removed. All are simple to make, but juices require special equipment (a masticating juicer), while blends can be concocted in any blender or Vitamix-type machine.

The “Triple B Blend” is one of the more adventurous recipes, combining apple and kale with raw pepitas, beets, and basil. “Cherry Cacao” is a healthy version of a chocolate-cherry shake, with a hit of kale and chia. And “Divine Vibration” combines citrus fruits with aloe vera, sage, lavender flowers, and rose petals for an aromatic elixir. Juice recipes are offered in three simple templates, with which you can make variations on a theme. Roll and Piatt emphasize that all ingredients for blends and juices should be organic.

Gluten-free berry scones
Gluten-free berry scones (Maclay Heriot and Gunny Guzman)

Breakfast is the one meal the authors encourage us to re-think categorically, putting aside carb-laden heaviness and moving toward a new paradigm of drinkable salads, chia puddings, miso soup, and a “no-lox” plate that substitutes veggies for salmon and Brazil nut spread for cream cheese. There’s even a gluten-free berry scone recipe made with brown rice flour, potato starch, and garbanzo flour.

There is an additional section devoted to alternative milks made from hemp, white sesame seeds and cashews, and “cheeses” made with walnuts and coconut, as well as a section on “Sauces & Dressings.” In many ways, these are the key to the success of the recipes throughout the book, as they add familiar flavors that translate well to what might otherwise be daunting vegan recipes. Tahini green sauce, mushroom gravy, and raw mole are excellent bridges to the more austere dishes. Tahini green transforms the experience of eating steamed vegetables, and mushroom gravy enlivens country-style tempeh loaf, as well as simple mashed potatoes.

Grilled veggie salad with Dijon-honey vinaigrette
Grilled veggie salad with Dijon-honey vinaigrette (Maclay Heriot and Gunny Guzman)

“Soups and Salads” are especially seasonally driven, and the “Grilled Veggie Salad” is a beautiful example. Careful attention is given both to the selection and preparation of the food. Summer is when this dish shines, with corn, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, and young lettuces, tossed warm in a Dijon-honey vinaigrette.

A twist on a high-calorie classic, Roll and Piatt’s version of Fettuccini Alfredo relies on vegan butter (with a palm oil base) and butternut squash and cashews in place of parmesan. The result is a rich, creamy, and deeply comforting meal.

An interesting substitute for one of Roll’s cravings from childhood, tuna salad, is the mercury-free “untuna” with walnuts, olives, celery and seaweed.

Rich’s Birthday Apple Pie
Rich’s Birthday Apple Pie (Maclay Heriot and Gunny Guzman)

Another classic dish that receives excellent treatment is apple pie, Roll’s favorite birthday version, in fact. The crust is made with flaxseed and walnuts, and the apples are sliced thinly and fanned out as in a galette.

While the book offers ample practical advice about how to select, prepare, and serve plant-based foods, it is as much of a lifestyle guide as anything else. The section called “Raising Healthy Kids” will be of interest to skeptical parents who are interested in veganism, but worry about providing their youngsters a balanced diet with enough protein. Roll and Piatt take a gradual, non-judgmental approach, suggesting that if you “walk your talk” and cook with love (without being pushy), then kids almost always follow suit and begin to explore foods they might not have gravitated to on their own.

The book closes with three different ways of breaking down and packaging the basic philosophy espoused, inviting the reader to test the waters. Those on the “Vitality Path” view food as energy, strive to balance yin and yang, and eat, essentially, to shore up the life force. “Performance Path” followers seek food as fuel, thinking more about combinations of foods that will increase their physical performance in any area. This protocol emphasizes super-foods and calorie-packed fuel for training. Finally, the “Transformation Path” is all about food as an alchemical decision that affects gut ecology, metabolism, and other health aspects that might be of concern.

Whether you’re all in, a dabbler, or just someone who wonders what you might feel like if animal products were not in your system, The Plantpower Way is an un-scary introduction to 21st-century veganism: that is to say, a plant-based diet with style.

Gates’ Real Reason for Wanting Gay Scout Leaders

A lot of people reacted very positively to Boy Scouts of American President Robert Gates saying that the ban on gay scout leaders can’t be sustained and the rules should be changed, but the reason he said that is not quite so benign. This could easily be missed in his statement:

Speaking at the Boy Scouts’ annual national meeting in Atlanta, Mr. Gates said cascading events — including potential employment discrimination lawsuits and the impending Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, as well as mounting internal dissent over the exclusionary policy — had led him to conclude that the current rules “cannot be sustained.”

If the Boy Scouts do not change on their own, he said, the courts are likely to force them to, and “we must all understand that this will probably happen sooner rather than later.”…

In his speech, Mr. Gates, who is also a former director of the C.I.A., evoked his experience as defense secretary. In that role, he helped end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — which was similar to the current Boy Scouts policy toward Scout leaders — and discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

He recalled that in 2010, a federal judge declared the military policy to be illegal. “Only a stay granted by the appeals court — granted, I believe, mainly because we were in the process of changing the law — prevented dramatic disruption in the armed forces,” he said Thursday.

“If we wait for the courts to act,” he continued, “we could end up with a broad ruling that could forbid any kind of membership standard,” such as the belief in a duty to God and the goal of specifically serving the needs of boys.

So his reason, if this is to be taken seriously, is that he feared that if they didn’t end anti-gay discrimination, they might lose the ability to continue engaging in anti-atheist discrimination. That’s both very unlikely (the courts have already ruled that the BSA can set its own policies as a private organization) and, if he actually believes it, a really, really bad reason for doing it.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

East Bay Restaurants Adapt to New Minimum Wage

On March 2, the city of Oakland raised its minimum wage by 36%. At $12.25 per hour, the new wage is the highest in the country — for now. San Francisco matched this wage on May 1, and Emeryville will leapfrog both cities in July.

The wage increase was voted into law last November as a part of Measure FF. Over 80% of Oakland residents supported the measure. And while all Oakland businesses are now required to abide by the new wage, conversations about its benefits and repercussions have been most active in the restaurant industry.

Restaurants have notoriously small operational budget margins, and are, according to Saru Jayaraman, the co-director of Restaurant Opportunity Centers United (ROC-United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, one of the largest employers of low-wage workers in the United States. Jayaraman reports that seven out of the ten lowest paying jobs in the country are restaurant jobs.

Saru Jayaraman, seen here speaking with Berkeleyside’s Frances Dinkelspiel at Uncharted 2014, says in the long run wage increases in the restaurant field will be better for business.
Saru Jayaraman, seen here speaking with Berkeleyside’s Frances Dinkelspiel at Uncharted 2014, says in the long run wage increases in the restaurant field will be better for business. (Pete Rosos)

California does, however, have some protections for restaurant workers. Service staff is required to make at least the state minimum wage; they are not permitted to be paid a “tipped minimum” of $2.13 per hour as they are in other states. Still, the state’s minimum wage of $9 per hour doesn’t go very far in the Bay Area’s booming economy. (Indeed, according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, the minimum wage needed to support a single adult in Oakland is over $11; one needs to make over double that number to support even a small family.)

“There’s been an ongoing problem in the restaurant industry where many of our employees have trouble paying the bills. It is bad for the industry and bad for the community,” said Jay Porter, the owner of The Half Orange in Fruitvale and upcoming Salsipuedes in North Oakland. “When one of your most significant industries as a whole employs people at a sub-living wage, that’s not good for the community. That’s money that’s not circulating in the economy. It also means that there’s a really high turnover. It means that a lot of people are having to work 70 to 80 hours a week to pay the bills.”

Measure FF was an attempt to change that problem. The measure not only set Oakland’s minimum wage at $12.25 per hour, but it also added mandatory paid sick leave and provided means for retaliation should employers not follow the new rules. Oakland’s new wage is now also tied to the Consumer Price Index, and it will be allowed to rise each year on January 1.

Restaurant owners have adapted to the wage increase in various ways. Most, like Porter, have simply increased prices to account for the higher labor costs. Other restaurants, such as Homestead, Dopo, Camino in Oakland, and Comal in Berkeley, have used this wage increase to re-format their entire wage structure. All four have eliminated tipping and have incorporated the average tip amount (around 20% of the total bill) to the line item charge for each dish on their menus. Still others, like Bocanova in Jack London Square, have added a mandatory service charge to their bill.

These adaptations are part of a larger conversation. Last month saw local and national protests for a $15 minimum wage. Measure FF has prompted many restaurants to reconsider tipping and fair pay between employees. Small, non-English speaking food businesses are closing, or considering it. Emeryville is considering an historically large wage bump — from $9 per hour to over $14. And everyone, especially restaurant workers, are reconsidering what, exactly, a fair wage means.

Jay Porter and Katie Mayfield own The Half Orange and forthcoming Salsipuedes. Porter has been an advocate for disrupting the traditional tipping systems in restaurants.
Jay Porter and Katie Mayfield own The Half Orange and forthcoming Salsipuedes. Porter has been an advocate for disrupting the traditional tipping systems in restaurants. (Jay Porter)

Increases better for business?

UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) prepared a policy brief on the Oakland measure last June. The research suggested that restaurants and retail businesses would likely be most affected by the increase, but restaurants would only need to raise their prices by 2.5%. Authors Michael Reich, Ken Jacobs, Annette Berndardt and Ian Perry suggested that reduced employee turnover costs and improved work performance would make up for increased labor costs.

However, most of the restaurant owners we have spoken to have all raised their prices much more than 2.5%. Chris Hillyard of Farley’s coffee shops in Uptown and in Emeryville raised his prices between 5% and 15%, depending on the item. Sal Bednarz of Actual Café and Victory Burger gave most of his items at 9% bump. Porter’s prices went up around 15%.

“It is clear that the researchers missed some of the important parts of the picture. They talked about a restaurant price increase of 3%. That still may be the average price increase, but for the small restaurants that I’m talking to, none of us can do it for 3%, none of us,” said Bednarz. “A lot of us are doing double digit price increases, much more.”

Hillyard noted labor costs are more complicated than the direct wage cost. “There are also sick days. Plus workers compensation goes up because your payroll costs have gone up,” he said. Indeed, the IRLE report didn’t include the increased costs of paid sick leave. However, Reich noted in an email that Oakland area restaurant prices have been increasing around 2.4% per year, which makes these bumps part of a general trend.

Despite these price increases, most Oakland restaurants are still doing what they do best.

“Our revenue is up a bit, and our customer traffic is close to what it was before we made the changes. We’ve had a lot of customers who have noticed the price increases. Some already understood why [they were] going up, some didn’t,” said Bednarz. “My crew was well equipped to educate them and had good conversations across the counter.”

However, Bednarz did report that his morning coffee business has been a bit slower than usual. “Who knows what that is. It could be something like our customers are driving a different direction to get to work or that schools in the neighborhood have different hours this week. In a few weeks it may come back, but it may not.” Porter and Hillyard also report fairly consistent business.

Jayaraman says that in the long run, the wage increase will be better for business. “The economy is going to do better. I think we’re going to see better restaurants, better service, better food. I think we’re going to see actually faster job growth. That’s what we’ve seen everywhere else every time the wage has gone up,” she said.

Another IRLE overview report on local minimum wage laws said that wage increases do increase the spending power of employees and that they do typically spend that extra money. The authors did note, however, that research still needs to be done to estimate the economic stimulus created by this new spending power.

Perhaps just as important as spending power is employee morale. “You’re going to have healthier workers because they have paid sick days. You’re going to have happier workers because they’re better paid. You’re going to have better service. It’s going to be good for everybody,” said Jayaraman.

However, as Bednarz explained, these changes will not happen overnight. His employees received their first increased pay check three weeks after restaurants instated higher prices. “That’s a number of weeks of lag,” he said. “The folks who are coming to a place like mine in the morning are coming up for their morning coffee, and they’re often daily customers. A small increase in what they’re paying, that increases five times. It accumulates. I’m not saying that these people don’t care about what we’re doing, but they may not be able to afford to care.”

Sandwiches at Victory Burger have gone up in price by around 9% after the wage increase went into effect.
Sandwiches at Victory Burger have gone up in price by around 9% after the wage increase went into effect. (Emilie Raguso)

Front of house or back of the house? Unequal pay

Historically, there have been three different wage structures in place in restaurants. Employees in the “back of the house” — cooks, dishwashers, bussers — make a single hourly wage without tips. Those in the “front of the house” — servers and hosts — make an hourly minimum plus tips on their bills. Managers usually get a salary.

Because California doesn’t allow for a tipped minimum, front-of-house workers typically take home far more income than the cooks and dishwashers in the back of the house — even if the back-of-the-house workers are making more than the minimum wage. This means that, even if all employees get a wage increase, the front of house still stands to bring home substantially more income. If prices increase, tips will increase as well, further increasing take-home pay. (Some restaurant owners we spoke to, like Porter, gave everyone a raise, while others, like Bednarz, raised wages only for those making below $12.25, with a few exceptions.)

At a high-end restaurant where diners are tipping 20% on a $100 tab, the profits for servers can be very high. “I understand that for servers in places that they’re still getting tipped, they’re making a killing,” said Tim Veatch, a cook at Camino.

It is a fairly common practice for restaurants to “pool” tips at the end of service and divide up the total among employees. Typically under this system, servers take home a higher proportion of the tip, while back-of-the-house employees get a smaller percentage.

California’s labor code makes this practice a little more complicated. It does allow for tip pooling, but the original legislation says that tips must go to those who are in a “direct line of service.” However, in 2009, the California Supreme Court ruled on several cases that challenged the wording of the legislation. In Etheridge v. Reins International, the court held that all employees in the “chain of service” are eligible to receive a share of tips, which included dishwashers and other members of the kitchen staff. In Budrow v. Dave & Busters, the court expanded that idea to say that the decision regarding who can participate in the tip pool can be “based on a reasonable assessment of the patron’s intentions.” The differences between a “direct line of” and “chain of” service aren’t exactly clear-cut, and the definition of a “reasonable assessment” is open to legal interpretation.

Each restaurant owner that we spoke to said that they try to balance wages between the front and back of the house as best as possible, but have been wary of violating the law. When Hillyard and his wife and co-owner Amy Hillyard opened Farley’s, the pair intentionally gave their cooks the job of delivering food to customers so that they could legally participate in the tip pool. Bednarz says that he has always pooled tips and has suggested raising the tip share between employees, but the final say came down to the employees.

“There’s a legal minefield that we’re trying to maneuver here as we try to do right. And there are lots of ways that we can do wrong,” said Bednarz. “My interest is in making sure that the staff also feels like it is fair. None of the front of house crew, who have to give up a little bit more of what they take in, is unhappy to give a little bit more of it to the kitchen.”

Part of the reason for their willingness, Bednarz added, is because tip amounts have gone up along with prices. “Prices go up, tips go up, a lot more of the crew get to share more deeply in the pool of tips, and effectively everybody gets a raise,” he said.

When California’s state minimum wage rose from $8 per hour to $9 in July 2014, Camino owners Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain made attempts to encourage the service staff to distribute tips. Unlike Bendarz’s employees, they chose not to.

This was around the time that Veatch started working at the restaurant. “Russ and Allison had made a few attempts to allow the service staff to give us larger portions of the tipped money that was coming in, to cut the kitchen in,” he said. “But the law dictates that you, as the manager of a restaurant, are not allowed to distribute a server’s tips. They have to do that for themselves.”

Veatch believes this system to be entirely inequitable. “The real issue is that the money from tips is part of the kitchen’s doing. That imbalance has always bothered me, as someone who puts the hours in and who puts the passion in. Then there are other people who can walk in, serve your passion and walk out with two times the amount of money that you made in half the time,” he said.

This fact was part of Moore’s impetus for completely re-formatting his pay structure. “I was tired of the semi-legal prospect of trying to get the waiters to tip out more to the back of the house or trying to alter the tip pool,” he said. “We all know it’s sort of a grey area.” As of January 31, Camino no longer accepts tips.

Russell Moore, co-owner of Camino: “Why don’t we just charge people what it costs to eat at our restaurant?”
Russell Moore, co-owner of Camino: “Why don’t we just charge people what it costs to eat at our restaurant?” (Courtesy Russell Moore)

The not-so-simple question of tipping

Moore and Hopelain had always wanted to eliminate tips. Before opening Camino, Moore worked at Chez Panisse, where there is a 17% service charge on all bills. He and Hopelain wanted to take this principle one step further and incorporate that charge into the cost of the dishes. But, he said, “we kind of chickened out. We were going to be in this weird stretch of Oakland and back then there weren’t many restaurants opening there.” The pair instead instated a regular tipping system with a tip pool. They kept all front of house employees at the same wage, where they all shared tasks and tips.

However, Moore said, “As minimum wage has been going up, we’ve thought more and more about how we could change it and what we could do.” They entertained the idea of adding a service charge, as at Chez Panisse, but changed their mind once they read the wording of Measure FF. According to the measure, service charges “shall be paid over in their entirety to the Hospitality Workers performing services for the customers.” The measure also stipulates that supervisors and owners could not take in any of the service charges. Moore was concerned that he wouldn’t legally be able to divide a service charge with the back of the house workers.

“It didn’t seem like we could cleanly have a service charge and cleanly decide where all that money goes,” he said. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we just charge people what it costs to eat at our restaurant?’”

Each of Camino’s menus advertises its tip-less system in bold type. And the dishes themselves are significantly more expensive — more than 20% — than they were before the change. The increased item price goes directly to paying employees’ higher wages.

So far, says Moore, there hasn’t been any backlash from customers.

Host Hannah Rice is often the first person to explain the new system to guests. “I thought people wouldn’t be so accepting. But everyone has been really excited about it,” she said.

Veatch has been in to eat in the restaurant on his days off and he says that his friends find it exciting. “They’re like, ‘Oh there’s no tip!’ There’s confusion as to what you’re supposed to do, but I talk them through it,” he said. “I think everyone has really accepted it as a beneficial form of dining. You just get to sign your check and leave.”

Porter says that models like Camino’s have been met with criticism from labor activists because “they say it removes money from the pockets of servers and that is against the intent of Measure FF.”

However, notes Jayaraman, “The impetus to move more and more towards living wages paid by the employer as opposed to by consumer tips is a good thing.”

Moore admits that he did lose servers over the wage change. “For some of our more experienced servers, this just gave them the impetus to do that other career that they wanted to do, start that business, go back to school, or do something else. They didn’t leave with ill will,” he said. “A couple went to other restaurants to make more money. But everyone gave lots of notice and we had plenty of time and at the end of the day, we have a really great staff, front and back.”

He has tried to combat employee turnover by increasing hours and reformatting the wage structure to encourage employees to work for promotion. Importantly, Moore says that the current wage structure incentivizes his servers to work five days a week, which qualifies them for health insurance.

Servers’ wages are also more predictable, he said. “I’ve always hated that feeling that servers are guns for hire. Like, ‘Oh it’s going to be a slow night, let’s cut them. Things are dying down, let’s send them home,’” he said. “Our selling points to servers were, ‘Yes, on a good Saturday night you’ll make less money. But on a slow Saturday brunch you’re going to make more.’” On those slow days, Moore gives the front of house staff other tasks to do, such as helping with kitchen prep work, in order for them to keep their hours up.

Moore has also built in a growth track for his front of house employees. Typically, servers do not want to get promoted to a management position, he said, because that salary pays less than the server was making in tips. Plus, in his old system, all servers were paid the same. Now he gives servers with more experience a higher starting wage. “There’s incentive for the new server to learn more and become a better server and manager,” he said. “Like any other job in the world, you can get a raise, or you can not get a raise. We can manage people like you can manage people in any other line of work.”

Rice was hired before the change, and she decided to stay on, despite losing her tips. “Overall I probably make less, but I’m OK with that. I think it is the right thing to do,” she said. “The minimum wage should be helping everyone, and with tips it is only really helping the front of the house. The dishwashers and the bussers get left behind. Everyone works together, so for one person to be making more is unfair.” Rice added that she would be happy to work at another restaurant with a similar tipless pay structure.

For now, though, she hopes to continue to work and move up the ranks at the restaurant. “They’re providing a chance for everyone to move around and be familiar with other parts of the restaurant,” she said. “We get to see different sides of the restaurant and experience a different position.”

On the other hand, Cabril Barnes, a manager at both Actual Café and Victory Burger, says that he would be one of those servers to leave if tips had been eliminated at his restaurant. “Tips are definitely an incentive. I personally would not want to work in a place without tips and work just for a flat base rate,” he said.

Despite the staffing changes, Moore and his employees all report that the restaurant’s service has improved. “We have a better sense of teamwork now,” said Rice. “Guests are looking closer at our service and they’re applauding us. Everyone is noticing positive effects.”

Porter has long been an advocate for eliminating tips. He famously did so at his San Diego restaurant, The Linkery. “The idea that servers are motivated by tips is an enormous fallacy that has been totally disproven,” he said. “Great servers, as long as they are well-compensated, are going to do great work without tipping incentives. It turns out that that is pretty much how every other American works. When you’re fairly compensated, you’re going to do great work out of your own personal pride and the joy of doing great work.”

Indeed, Moore reports that his servers feel just like that. “The servers said something curious the other day at staff meal. They said, ‘There’s something about this which makes everything feel more professional. It makes it feel less like I’m putting on an act for a customer in the hopes that they might tip me. It’s more like I have an incentive to just do a really good job.’”

Bednarz agrees. “You can argue all day long about how tips deviate based on the level of service or product that we give — they don’t. On a crappy day, our tips are just as good as on a good day. We know when we’re screwing up on the floor and when we’re kicking ass. And tips are mostly the same,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Moore’s back of the house team is pleased with the changes. “The cooks got raises and they’re excited that we’ve taken an interest in making it so they can keep living here. Our cooking crew has always been fairly solid, but now it’s really solid,” said Moore. “We pay more than almost anyone now. It’s still not enough, but it’s getting there.”

Added Veatch, “I’ve been in the industry for ten years and I’ve never worked at a restaurant that was more respectful for my hours, did more to pay me for the moments that I’m in there, and cared more for me from a quality-of-life perspective and a cost of living perspective than Camino. I would never go back to a restaurant with a traditional tipping system.”

Moore hopes that more restaurants will see Camino’s success and mimic their payment approach. “What I would love is for the restaurants that are really busy and popular, that make more money, for them to make the change,” he said. “But I think they’re nervous about losing their floor staff.”

“It’s going to be a really big change, and there’s going to be a big transition,” Moore continued. “I think the ‘no tipping’ model might be the model because I think customers are going to get tired of weird charges at restaurants.”

Rice agrees. “I think that we’re going to be seeing a lot of less traditional restaurant [pay structures] over time. We’ll be seeing more restaurants that are adopting what Camino is doing,” said Rice. “Restaurants are also becoming more professional than they were before, which is a big deal for the Bay Area because restaurants are such a big part of our economy.”

Overall, Moore is pleased with the change. “It’s sort of scary being the test case but Allison and I are super happy with it,” he said.

Chinatown’s Legendary Palace shut down earlier this year.
Chinatown’s Legendary Palace shut down earlier this year. ( sfbaywalk/Flickr)

Wages increase and Chinatown struggles

Other restaurateurs in Oakland have not been as happy.

In March, stories in on NBC Bay Area, on CBS SF Bay Area, and in the San Francisco Chronicle documented struggles in Oakland’s Chinatown. The Chronicle reported that four restaurants and six grocery stores in and around Chinatown closed in advance of the wage hike, including Legendary Palace, a popular banquet restaurant.

However, Bednarz, who has been working with the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, says the problem in Chinatown is greater than the repercussions of increased labor costs. “There’s kind of a perfect storm going on in Chinatown. The port strike really hurt during Chinese New Year. There is the competition around Chinatown. Other cities now have more Asian markets and restaurants popping up so that people that used to commute to Chinatown to do their shopping now sometimes do it in their home city. Real-estate prices are starting to go up,” he said. “And now there’s this wage increase.”

Chinatown restaurants have generally not followed the same trends as the newer, pricier restaurants in booming parts of Oakland. Instead, they have succeeded based on providing food and other goods at super-low prices. According to Bednarz, it is this pricing structure that may be these businesses’ downfall. “It’s apparent that some Chinatown businesses might need to find other strategies to differentiate themselves. Rather than using price as the primary means to compete, they may need to focus on service and product instead,” Bednarz wrote in an op-ed for Oakland Local. “They might need to use different marketing strategies to reach non-Chinese customers, but need to do this carefully so they don’t alienate their Chinese neighbors.”

Jayaraman takes a harder stance. She points out that all restaurants have to refigure their budgets for all sorts of unexpected price increases, such as food costs or rental agreements. “When other costs go up and you see a business close, the public doesn’t say, ‘Oh well, that means we should have kept food costs artificially down.’ They say, ‘That’s too bad the restaurant couldn’t figure out how to make it work,’” she said. “Why is it that with wages alone, as opposed to every other cost, we say, ‘We should artificially depress wages to help out these business owners?’ We don’t say that with food costs, we don’t say that with supplier costs of any other kind. We can’t say that with human costs either. Human costs have so much greater impact on so many more people than all the other costs that a restaurant has to pay.”

Both Bednarz and Jayaraman agree that outreach and business support will go a long way to preventing more businesses from closing. “Our feeling is that business that just outright close when the minimum wage goes up either weren’t properly operating to begin with or don’t have the support or the know-how and the technical assistance to figure out how to make it work,” said Jayaraman. “I would love these employers that are struggling to be in touch with us and we can provide … peer support, or even potential access to various supports and capital.”

Jayaraman has organized a group of what she calls “High Road Restaurants” within ROC-United. “It’s not only a group of folks that are advocating for better wages and working conditions but it’s also a peer network for employers to learn from one another how to continually raise wages and do the right thing,” she said. In the East Bay, her group includes Arizmendi, Café Gabriela, FuseBOX, Kain’bigan, Kingston 11, PieTisserie, Sweet Bar Bakery, Tamales la Oaxaquena, and the Swan’s Marketplace businesses B-Dama, Cosecha, Miss Ollie’s, and The Cook and Her Farmer. Kingston 11, in particular, has been involved in the group. Jayaraman says that the owners Adrian Henderson, Nigel Jones and Andre King came with her to Washington D.C. during the “Fight for 15” rallies on April 15.

Similarly, Bednarz, along with Hillyard and several other prominent Oakland restaurateurs like Charlie Hallowell of Pizzaiolo, Penrose, and Boot and Shoe Service; Chris Pastena of Chop Bar and Lungomare; Emily and Scott Goldenberg of Caffe 817; and Allison Arevalo and Erin Wade of Homeroom teamed up earlier this year to brainstorm ways to adapt their budget and support other small business owners. “I would characterize the group as being a collection of values-driven restaurant owners, folks who are as concerned about fairness as they are about their own personal financial well-being,” said Bednarz.

“We didn’t form it to be an advocacy group or anything, it was more about partnering together,” said Hillyard. “If we wanted to do social marketing stuff together, great. If we just wanted to be a sounding board for ideas for one another, that’s OK too.”

The group’s main objective quickly became clear — education. “We needed to educate the public on why prices were going up and why it’s a good thing because everyone is going to be earning more income,” said Hillyard. “Our customers understood why prices went up and it’s fortunately worked out OK so far.” Member restaurants were active supporters of the Lift Up Oakland campaign, and some, like Bednarz and Hillyard, spoke at rallies and wrote letters to members of Oakland’s government.

“Speaking for myself personally, and interpreting what I hear and see from other folks, we genuinely give a crap about what is happening in all parts of Oakland,” said Bednarz. “And the last thing that I want to see is small businesses that have been anchors of neighborhoods for decades go out of business because they are unable to adapt to the change in their cost structure.”

Barnes, who works for Bednarz, was so impressed with his employer’s involvement that he, too, got involved. He spoke with other neighborhood restaurants and wrote a letter to the new mayor, Libby Schaff, who was been a vocal supporter of the campaign.

The best way to help any business struggling with the wage increase, say both Bednarz and Jayaraman, is to continue to support Oakland businesses, especially those in Chinatown. “Visit Chinatown. Remind yourself that it’s full of interesting restaurants and eat at your favorites. Tell the staff that you’d support them even if they raised their prices a bit,” said Bednarz.

Actual Café.
Actual Café. (Carrie Cizauskas/Flickr)

Emeryville set for highest minimum wage in country

Only three miles but a world away from Chinatown, Oakland’s neighbor to the west has been having minimum wage debates of its own. Last week, Emeryville’s city council unanimously approved a rapid minimum wage increase — from $9 to over $14 per hour — to occur this July.

Unlike Oakland’s wage increase, Emeryville’s change did not come about via an election. Instead, the council members drafted and voted on an ordinance to increase the wage on their own, as they did in Berkeley last year. The council has accepted public comments at special city council meetings, but did not call for a study of the increase or ask for input other than during meetings.

The council’s wage will be, by far, the highest in the country, and it is set to increase almost to $16 per hour by 2019. Despite support for a fair wage, Emeryville small businesses were not supportive of the original proposal, which would have included all businesses with at least 10 employees.

Businesses with fewer than 10 employees would be able to take a small business exemption and phase in the wage increase over three years. Those who take the exemption would need to match Oakland’s $12.25 wage on July 1; the following year, wages would rise to $13 per hour and continue to increase by one dollar per hour each year until 2019, when the wage would need to match the rest of Emeryville. After push back from business owners like Hillyard, who has 12 employees at his Emeryville location and wouldn’t have qualified for the exemption, the council has amended its proposal to define a small business at 55 employees.

The problem, said Hillyard, who opened his Emeryville Farley’s location in 2010, is that the increase is scheduled to go in effect overnight. Hillyard has already raised his prices at his Emeryville location to match those at Farley’s East, but doesn’t believe he could retain his customers with a second price increase this summer. “There would definitely be customer push back at that point. I don’t know what we would do,” he said. “Even our employees are saying, ‘Wow, that’s a big increase. That would be great, but that might be hard for the business.’”

Another concern about Emeryville’s wage increase is that it will shift the economic dynamic between it and other East Bay cities. Employees could theoretically leave jobs in Berkeley or Oakland to go work in Emervyille, while customers could theoretically abandon pricier Emeryville restaurants for others across the border.

As Bendarz explained, it isn’t difficult for potential customers to comparison shop. “A latte is a latte and you can get something fairly similar at plenty of places around town. For customers who are particularly price sensitive, it’s not a big trip for them to go two blocks across the Berkeley border and get a similar drink for less,” he said.

In an attempt to stymie these concerns, Berkeley mayor Tom Bates proposed a coordinated regional minimum wage last spring between the East Bay cites of Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Albany and El Cerrito. Bates suggested that each neighboring city match Oakland’s wage plan in order to level the playing field between regional businesses. “I don’t want to put our businesses at a disadvantage with regard to neighboring communities. It makes sense for everyone to have the same wage,” he told Berkeleyside in April 2014.

Likewise, Hillyard is in support of a regional approach to wage increase. “It would make it much easier for businesses. For example, [Bednarz’s] Actual Cafe is a block and half away from our Emeryville store. If they’re paying a wage that’s two dollars less per hour that means their prices are going to be less as well and it puts our Emeryville store in a difficult competitive situation. The increase would be a real challenge for Emeryville small businesses,” he said.

As of October, when Berkeley’s minimum wage went up to $10 per hour, Bates was still advocating for a regional wage. It may happen without actual legislation. Both Oakland and Emeryville’s wage increases have prompted further discussion on the part of Berkeley City Council’s Labor Commission. Last month, the commission proposed a revised minimum wage law that would increase wages to $16 by 2017 and include language similar to Measure FF regarding service charges. The council is expected to consider the proposal June 9; meanwhile Berkeley’s Minimum Wage Initiative Coalition plans on filing for a ballot measure petition should the proposal fall through, according to the Conta Costa Times.

Chris Hillyard, owner of Farley’s on 65th in Emeryville and Farley’s East in Uptown, supported Measure FF, but has concerns about Emeryville’s proposed wage increase.
Chris Hillyard, owner of Farley’s on 65th in Emeryville and Farley’s East in Uptown, supported Measure FF, but has concerns about Emeryville’s proposed wage increase. (courtesy Chris Hillyard)

Looking to the future: diners encouraged to get involved

The IRLE is currently researching how Oakland restaurants have adapted to the wage increase. The research center collected data on prices before and after the increase, and, according to Reich, plans to release the research soon.

Regardless of the results, Oakland restaurant employees and owners predict more changes to come.

“This is such a big picture win for everybody, but any time that there’s a change in the industry, any time there’s a disruption like this, it will have some kind of random effects,” said Porter. “Some might unfortunately take a hit to their business, and that could be me. There’s no guarantee that it won’t be me. So everyone’s a little nervous because you know that when there’s a sea change like this, it’s the roll of the dice could be that it doesn’t work for me short term.”

However, added Porter, “The only way to make the business sustainable is for price of going out to reflect the price of paying employees in our community enough to live on.”

Pina Kahlo, a barista at the new Speaker Box Café in Uptown, thinks that the minimum wage issue is more complicated. “Minimum wage is going to be minimum wage. The system was never meant to fully take care of [service workers]. It is up to us as individuals to be good neighbors to one another, to see one another as human,” she said.

Her solution? Stay active and engaged. “Come out for fair wage, come be with people who also think and want to hang out and make friends too. If you are not out being with people who expressly say ‘I am about this thing,’ then you are the one that’s missing out,” she said.

Similarly, Jayaraman encourages diners to continue to participate in the wage discussion. “I would encourage the consuming public to continue to express their support for workers having better wages and working conditions every time they eat out,” she said. “It’s both a way to let restaurants know that customers really value these things, and it’s also a way to express support to employers who are making the change, staying in business, doing it right, not complaining and trying to figure it out. … More than ever we should be supporting Oakland restaurants because they’ve made a huge leap.”