An interesting way to run a CSA

I like the idea of community-supported-agriculture programs. The idea is that consumers pay farmers up front in exchange for a cut of the farmer’s harvest. It’s supposed to reduce the risk local producers face by spreading it out among customers. Perfect growing weather? Eaters share in the plenty and abundance. Crappy growing season and deer infestation? There’s a lot less to go around.

Part of the fun is that it’s a way to be forced to figure out what to do with food I wouldn’t usually buy. Like two years ago I swear we got nothing but kohlrabi all summer. And that fucking kohlrabi — a vegetable that even the deer didn’t want — was the beginning and ending of my CSA participation.

But I’m going to try it again this year and here’s why:
Salt Fork Farms has set up their CSA program differently. It requires an initial $200 buy-in, but instead of being loaded up with weird vegetables that I have no interest in cooking all summer long (or canning for the winter), I have the privilege of shopping at their farmers’ market stand with my $200-worth of punch cards (with a 10 percent discount). I can get a gazillion eggs and a few chickens. Or only greens in the spring. Or whatever else they’ve got.

I’m just happy that I won’t be forced to deal with kohlrabi again.

Twitter, Blackbird Pie and permanence

Twitter released a small, simple app called Blackbird Pie that, when Twitter isn’t painfully slow and blogged down, should make it easy to embed a tweet in a blog post. It creates little bit of static HTML code that you can plop in a page. Like so:

This is a tweet that I will later delete to see if the Blackbird Pie version stays up or goes away.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

But what if I delete the tweet? I think it will stay there, since I see the tweet’s text in the code. But thought I’d check. Also, one could, I guess, make a fake tweet pretty easily. (Not that it’s hard now.) Like so:

For lunch I ate an entire cow. Except its tail.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

Helpful? Maybe.

Update:
Clearly this takes on too much of my own CSS styling.

Update II:
There was clearly an issue with the code that Blackbird Pie was spitting out that has since been fixed. See:

This is a tweet that I will later delete to see if the Blackbird Pie version stays up or goes away.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

Later Robin Sloan suggested why is wasn’t exactly working the bestest, adding

So I just want to add a stronger caveat here. First of all: I think we’ll drop the royal “we” on Twitter Media from now on—it’s confusing. To be clear, this is just @robinsloan here, pitching a little hack of mine. Please regard it as such, even though it lives on this fancy domain. Seeing people call it a “feature” is making me cringe, because I know what kind of care goes into real Twitter features! This is not one of those.

Let me underscore the point: in the course of writing this blog, I coded up a simple script that I found helpful, so I decided to share it with you. It’s a prototype. It’s really rough. It doesn’t even work in a lot of places! But that’s what we mean by “experiment,” right? And, as part of the Twitter Media team, I couldn’t credibly ask producers and developers at media companies to experiment and prototype if I wasn’t doing the same thing myself.

And yes, I know it doesn’t work on Tumblr.

Update III:
I see now that WordPress was trying to “help me out.” Stop it.

Matt Steigerwald goes to Des Moines, wins Cochon 555. Again.

Cochon 555, a US tour that pairs five pigs with five cooks and pits the cooks against each other in a “friendly competition,” was in Des Moines again. Lincoln Cafe’s Matt Steigerwald (with a lot of help from his right-hand man Andy Schumacher) delivered a wonderful assortment of dishes and won again.

The competition, with a pair of chefs up from Kansas City and George Formaro of Django and Centro, was higher this year and, over all, the food was better. Deciding for whom to vote was a real struggle; a point separated my top three.

It’s interesting to see what themes get repeated. Last year, three of the five cooks served pulled pork and cole slaw on a buscuit. None of that this year, but we did get three pozole soups.

Favorites were Hal Jasa of Homage’s fried-pig-ear and quail-egg salad and his corned tongue. Cody Hogan of Lidia’s in Kansas City made my single favorite dish with a lovely pork ravioli. Steigerwald offered a great variety, but tops might have been the head cheese. Formaro went straight Mexican and the chorizo taco was lovely. And Howard Hanna of the River Club in Kansas City offered a passionately produced menu (including the only straight vegetables of the evening), but the best was his “Cuban.” By the time all was said and done, there was no way I could eat a single goddamn pork-based dessert.

Anyway, there was a lot of pork and wine and I had a great time. Seriously, you should make plans to attend next year. But it was also a crazy drive home in the driving rain and now I need sleep.

One afternoon in Cupertino

Steven P. Jobs: Those fuckers are out to kill us, Phil.

Philip W. Schiller: I know, Steve, I know. Android keeps gaining, and OS 4 is just catching up to those assholes.

SPJ: And, really, how long can our magical revolution last before there’s a tablet that the Windows-box-buying slobs champion as open? And the new phone is a few months away. And still on AT&T.

PWS: I’ve been thinking about ordering an Incredible. At least until I can tote around an iPhone HD without the stupid-ass 3GS camouflage case.

SPJ: Goddammit, Phil, you wouldn’t.

PWS: I’m fuckin’ with you, Steve, but I’ve got an idea.

SPJ: Lay it on me.

PWS: Say one of those guys working on the new phone takes a prototype off campus. And he loses it.

SPJ: We yell and yell and yell and yell and then can his ass.

PWS: No, Steve, I’m saying what if we actually have him do that? Lose the phone on purpose.

SPJ: Are you fuckin’ insane?! I’d eat your fucking liver.

PWS: Listen: some dickhead would find the phone, figure out what he’s got and turn around and blab to someone, probably a place like the Wall Street Journal or The New York  Times or whatever. If he tries to return the phone, we just ignore him until he goes away. Then BAM! Plausible deniability! We own the news cycle again!

SPJ: Nobody’d believe a bullshit story like that.

PWS: We’d kill any hope those assholes in Redmond would get any press for their stupid pinky phones.

SPJ: …

PWS: We’d get another hit off the old hype pipe.

SPJ: Phil, you’re a genius!

PWS: You really mean that, Steve?

SPJ: No. It’s the dumbest goddamn idea I’ve ever heard.

PWS: Well it beats all these random fuckin’ e-mails you’ve be sending to customers.

Why the old model is dying: a case study

Earlier this year, a reporter from US News & World Report got in touch with my wife. The reporter was working on a story for the magazine’s annual graduate school rankings issue, which is a Big Deal for both the magazine and the schools.

After several e-mails back and forth and a few phone calls with the reporter, the magazine’s photo editor got in touch to schedule a day when a photographer could come out and get some art for the piece. They picked a day the following week.

The magazine flew a freelance photographer from Washington, D.C., to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a week’s notice, and paid for his meals, rental car and a night in a hotel. He spent the day taking photos and ended up with a glorified stock photo and a cutline that doesn’t even identify it has being anywhere outside of Washington, D.C.

The story mentions and quotes my wife a single time. At the very end.

So how much did this photo cost? And what did it add?

And is it any wonder that this business model has been proven unsustainable?

Come feast on some pork

Last year I had a great time gorging on pork and helping judge Cochon 555 in Des Moines. I’m excited that Brady Lowe asked me to do it again this year. You should come along. From the release:

A group of chefs will each prepare a 140-pound heritage breed hog from head to toe for this friendly competition. Guests and professional judges will determine a winner based on presentation, utilization and overall best flavor. The winner will be crowned the “Prince/Princess of Porc.” In addition, five selected winemakers will showcase their wines. Cochon555 is a tribute to heritage and heirloom breeds, chefs and winemakers.

Some great cooks, including Matt Steigerwald of Lincoln Cafe, George Formaro of Centro and Django, and Hal Jasa of homage, will be preparing pigs.

Anyway, it’s at the Hotel Fort Des Moines on Saturday, April 24, starting at 3:30 p.m if you’re interested in paying for the VIP pre-feast schmooze, the pig gets served up at 5. You can buy tickets online (get in touch if you’re interested in a discount code) or visit Cochon555.com for more information.

Metaphors: Burger King and, sigh, the Titanic

A too-quick-to-adapt Burger King
John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?

I believe the news business has been spinning mostly in circles not because the executives are slow to adapt to new technologies as many of the new media experts gripe. On the contrary, the news business has been too quick to adapt. Let me use Burger King as an illustration.

In the late 1970’s, Burger King introduced the “Have it your way” campaign. It was a smashing success. It told customers that if they didn’t want onions they don’t have to get onions. You could actually tell the person taking your order the way you wanted your burger as if you were at home preparing it yourself.

There were limits. You couldn’t tell them you wanted a specialty bun or spear pickles. They wanted you to know they would make the burger the way you wanted but still had profitability concerns. They still wanted to make money on their Whopper.

Today in the news business, we are like Burger King without the limits.

How do you want your news? Facebook? ok, email? ok, twitter? ok, without ads? ok, iPad? ok

A Burger King down the street from a burger joint overing free burgers with unlimited options
Judy Sims, in a comment on John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?

I think the flaw in your argument is that no one is offering free hamburgers with unlimited customization down the street from Burger King. If they were, BK would have to give away free hamburgers too and then figure out how to make money from delivering a different kind of value.

That’s what newspapers need to do. In fact, I believe that it is possible for online-only news media to be profitable. But they can’t be built off the traditional media cost structures.

Passengers on the Titanic
Howard Owens, in a comment on John P. Garrett’s Newspapers and the Burger King mentality. How would you like your news?

The fallacy is that journalism is expensive to produce. Good journalism is neither hard nor expensive. True, some stories can be expensive and hard and require experience and layers of editors, but the vast, vast majority of news is neither hard nor expensive.

Journalists intent on clutching to old models, like a Titanic passenger clinking to a deck railing, love to claim that only the old model can support the kind of journalism a democracy needs.

Reality is, however, it’s just not true. Especially now.

via Steve Buttry