Local rocket (Suzie’s Organic Farm), farmstead goat cheese (Wingshadows Hacienda), sweet corn (International Community Foundation Center), plum (Wingshadows Hacienda) vinaigrette

Heirloom cherry tomato (Suzie’s Organic Farm) & Manila clam (Carlsbad Aquafarm) dip, market produce (Suzie’s Organic Farm & Wingshadows Hacienda)

Thursday from 6pm to 9pm we’re having a big party at El Take It Easy for Suzie’s Farm CSA shareholders, people who might want to become Suzie’s Farm CSA shareholders, and anyone who would like to meet the farmers, or who just likes to have a good time.

Robin and Lucila

We’ll offer a special menu on Thursday at El Take It Easy, with lots of vegetarian dishes featuring what’s coming right now from the farm. Including:

* Romaine salad with wax beans
* Yellow beet soup
* Black radish taquitos
* Tiger bean fritters with celery slaw
* Eggplant and squash blossom cazuela
* Padron peppers w/ Baja olive oil and sancho sea salt
* Strawberry gazpacho with strawberry sorbet

Looking for some ideas as to what do with that CSA box? Well, there’s some.

We’ll also be tray passing some samples for y’all, and we’ll have happy hour drink specials until 9pm: draft beers for $3.50, Micheladas for $4.50, and house red wine for $5. Additionally, the night’s menu will include some ETIEZ faves such as pork belly tacos and tosti-locos, and a few other special treats including a grass-fed new york strip and local yellowtail.

Many of the farmers will be in house to talk and celebrate, and we’ll have a slide show going so you can see the farm virtually, up close.

Also, we’re proposing a rap throwdown between crews from Suzie’s and The Linkery.

Some of the Linkery folk and I had the the great opportunity to take part in the entire brewing process with Colby Chandler of Ballast Point Brewing.

Colby wanted to brew a San Diego farmhouse ale with ingredients that would have been found in the San Diego area when Cabrillo’s ships arrived in 1542.  The ingredients he wanted to use were local: Manzanita berries, white sage, white sage honey, agave, elder flowers and berries, roasted pinenuts, curacao.

Us being The Linkery, we know a lot of local farmers.  Bruce up at Wingshadows Haciendia who grows food just for The Linkery has a bunch of Manzanita trees on his grandparents old farmstead land just out of Warner Springs.

-We took a field trip.

Wes of North Park Native Plants

-Two days later, we went to the brewery for the brewing of the beer.

-Four weeks later, the yeasts have eaten all the sugars and the beer is kegged.

-Thursday the 29th of July the San Salvador (one of Cabrillo’s ships) Saison is making its debut (not including Ballast’s tasting rooms) at The Linkery.

30th on 30th is this Friday!

At the Link, we’ll be offering braised grass-fed beef short rib sliders for $3, and half pours of 30th Street Pale Ale for $2, tax and service included, cash only. Starting at 5:30, in the North Park Meat Company room only. We’ll also have $2 taste pours of cask wine in the Linkery dining room, along with the full menu.

(Correction to earlier post: it’s Thursday, not Friday, that we’ll be pouring the new Ballast Point San Salvador Saison, a San Diego Farmhouse Ale brewed with local ingredients, including some which the Linkery team secured from our friends at Wingshadows Hacienda.)

At El Take It Easy, we’ll be serving our beloved pork belly tacos on the front patio, $3 each, and 30th Street Pale, $2 for a half pour. Cash only, tax and service included. Full menu available inside.

See the rest of the street’s lineup here.

Two of my favorite things to do are 1) explore Tijuana and San Diego via bicycle, and 2) check out urban art installations, such as all the amazing ones brought to life recently by the MCASD “Viva La Revolucion” exhibit, and the installations in the neighborhood of Casa de Tunel, and others.

This weekend, thanks to Set & Drift, Sezio, Turista Libre, and the MCASD, you can do both of these things at the same time in a group of really great people.

Check it.

The real reason we do everything in house?

We want to be able to smell it when it comes out of the oven.

We get off on the sensory overload provided by a fully-engaged kitchen. It would be nice for you if you could have the all-day, all-encompassing experience of food preparation, like we do, but we try to pass on as much of it as possible. So while you didn’t have the heady privilege of inhaling the fragrance of homemade beer bread coming out of the oven at 3pm today (unless you who are reading this happen to be Max, Javi, Mario or Che), we hope that your senses are well compensated by other opportunities, such as the following:

                     Cubism? No, bresaola made from grass-fed beef (Spanish Oak Ranches) with house made beer bread and organic market produce.

                                                   Javi’s kettle-fried chicken (Curtis Womach) with white corn grits (Anson Mills) and agave nectar-glazed yellow peaches (Wingshadows Hacienda).

Local rocket (Suzie’s Organic Farm), pickled quail eggs, Bermuda onion (both from Wingshadows Hacienda), house cured bacon (Eden Farms), Pt. Reyes blue cheese-balsamic dressing

Local pastured chicken (Curtis Womach), heirloom tomato (Suzie’s Organic Farm) sauce, queso fresco, house made crema, cilantro (Suzie’s Organic Farm), Cipollini onion (Wingshadows Hacienda)

Pan-seared local halibut, tarragon (Wingshadows Hacienda) mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, baby turnips (La Milpa Organica), preserved Eureka lemon (Schaner Farms)

Tomorrow (Saturday) - Happy hour with Salon TONIC at El Take It Easy

Wednesday, July 28 - North Park Community Association Mixer at El Take It Easy

Thursday, July 29th - Suzie’s Farm CSA Party at El Take It Easy.

Friday, July 30th - 30th on 30th!

Saturday, July 31th - Something great at El Take It Easy

You published about 350 books for kids in developing nations, via our Beers for Books fundraiser on Wednesday at El Take It Easy. Congratulations!

Also congrats to Jose, Erin, Ali, and Leesa for winning fabulous raffle prizes, including bacon.

We’ll undoubtedly be holding weekly meat raffles soon.

New vegan entree! –> Spaghetti squash (Wingshadows Hacienda), Padron peppers, heirloom tomatoes (both from Suzie’s Organic Farm), Cipollini onions, Thumbelina carrot puree (both from Wingshadows Hacienda)

Ham & cheese: house cured pastured goat (Farinelli Ranch) city ham, Pt Reyes Farmstead Toma cheese, pickled Anaheim peppers (Black Dog Farm), jalapeno-mustard aioli, semolina bun

Rhubarb (Tierra Miguel Farm) pie, house made vanilla bean ice cream

Chilled yellow beet with pickled green heirloom tomatoes (both from Suzie’s Organic Farm) and tarragon (Wingshadows Hacienda)

Ditto.

In addition to Beers for Books tomorrow, we have another happy hour at El Take It Easy this week…on Saturday from 6pm-8pm we’re throwing a party for Salon TONIC and their friends and guests — and anyone who would like to come by and meet them.

Tell us you’re there for the happy hour and you’ll receive 25% off your tab. Also, we’ll be tray passing some complimentary tastes, as well.

Salon TONIC are a great group of people who have been friends and stylists to the Linkery team for a long time now. Obviously, I’m in no position to endorse a cutter of hair, but I can say that the well-groomed people I work with recommend them highly.

This is going to be fun. If you’re a Suzie’s Farm CSA member, or you think you might like to be, or you’re just curious, or you like having fun, then you should come to this event.

The El Take It Easy kitchen will be making special dishes from Suzie’s Farm produce, including complimentary tastes, the beer will be flowing, and it will be a great chance to meet many of the farmers. You’ll also get to see and taste the wide variety of world class produce that Suzie’s grows (which, if you’re not already, you could be getting regularly brought to a convenient pickup point as a CSA member).

Local rocket, heirloom tomatoes (both from Suzie’s Organic Farm), Reed avocado (Schaner Farm), Pozo Tomme cheese (Christine & Jim Maguire), blood orange vinaigrette

House cured Brianza salami (pastured Berkshire pork from Jim Neville) flatbread, Pt Reyes Toma cheese, squash blossom, heirloom tomato sauce (both from Suzie’s Organic Farm)

You may have heard the buzz about the fundraiser we are doing this Wednesday at El Take It Easy with Beers For Books. These events happen around town and are very fun and popular, they also do great work for people in need. For every beer you buy on Wednesday (and they’re only $3.50 a piece!), or soft drink, we’ll donate $1 to Room To Read. That $1 is all it takes to publish a book, in the local language, for children in village where such books are hard to come by.

So, we’ll see how many books we can publish by drinking beer.

Here’s the scoop:

Wednesday · 18:00 - 23:00
3926 30th Street, San Diego, CA

Beers for Books Wednesday July 21st 6pm - 11pm @ El Take It Easy. All craft beer drafts $3.50 All Micheladas $4.50.

For every beer we sell, we will give $1 to Room to Read. Each dollar provides a book for child n Nepal, Asia, Cambodia and more.

http://beersforbooks.org/
http://roomtoread.org/
http://eltakeiteasy.com/

For those of you new to Beers for Books, the concept is simple: For every beer you have, $1 will be donated to Room to Read and that buys a treasured book for children via Room to Read.

We’ll also have a raffle with all proceeds donated to Room To Read.

Room to Read is an amazing NPO whose mission is to provide quality educational opportunities to children in developing countries with the goal of empowering kids via literacy. Room to Read has projects in 8 countries Nepal, Cambodia, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Laos, Vietnam and South Africa. For more details see www.roomtoread.org

We changed up our menu structure quite a bit today, removing about 1/3 of the items from the food side. We all agreed that the next step in us improving as a restaurant, is to do fewer things, so we can make each thing we do, continually better.

Now, with fewer dishes to create, we can work to make sure that each one fully showcases the marvelous ingredients that we get from our farmers, and the craftmanship that goes into our artisan foods here.

Plus, hedonic researchers are pretty sure that having a lot of choices actually makes people (you) enjoy things less, and fewer choices make people happier. We’re in the making people happier business.

We hope you like the new, more focused menu. Tonite’s, as always, is here.

I’m pretty excited about our current and coming line-up of both cask and draft beers.

Ballast Point Brewery finished Brother Levonian Saison a week or two ago and this batch is really delicious.  Brother Levonian was a local homebrewer and friend to a lot of people in the beer community. He passed away a couple of years ago and in tribute to him a couple of local breweries have put his Saison in their yearly brewing rotation.  Pretty cool huh.   We have a cask of Ballast Point’s. It will be coming on later in the week.

We still have the cask-conditioned Tequlia barrel-aged barleywine from our friends down at Cupaca Brewery in Mexicali.  It’s really good.

On draft we have Eric’s ale from New Belgium Brewery In Colorado. Eric’s ale is a refershing sour ale brewed with peaches, it’s one of my favorites.

Doug the brewer down at the local Gordon Biersch in Mission Valley brews some really nice German style beers.  We are stoked to carry his Export Helles style Lager. A great summertime beer.

Also on the German side we have Hanger-24’s Alt-Bier.  A nice amber beer with a caramel malt tone and a clean finish.

Hasta!

We’ve been working to put our calendar of events together for the summer, and it’s turned out really great. A lot of the events are at El Take It Easy because we have a bit more room there (since it’s new and not as busy yet).

Here’s what we (and, we hope, you) will be up to:

AT EL TAKE IT EASY
Thursday, July 8 (tonite) - RISE happy hour
Wednesday, July 14 - Outdoor Outreach happy hour
Friday, July 16 - Chef’s dinner with Max Bonacci and Jair Téllez featuring 33 Encinos wine and Cucapá beer.
Wednesday July 21 - Beers For Books 6pm - 11pm
Saturday, July 24 - Party with Salon TONIC
Wednesday, July 28 - North Park Community Association Mixer
Thursday, July 29 - Suzie’s Farm CSA Shareholders party
Friday, July 30 - 30th on 30th
Saturday, July 31st - TBA
Wednesday, August 4 - Turista Libre nite with Derrik Chinn and Astronauta Jackson
Monday, August 30 - Edible San Diego release party / 30th on 30th

AT THE LINKERY
Sunday, July 11 - Green Flash Sessionfest & World Cup of Sausages final
Friday, July 30 - 30th on 30th
Thursday, August 5 - Farmers dinner with San Diego Weekly Markets (Little Italy Mercato, Adams Ave Farmers Market, North Park Farmers Market)
Thursday, August 12 - Alesmith cask pairings dinner
Thursday, August 19 - Pairings dinner with Margerum wines and winemaker Doug Margerum
Monday, August 30 - 30th on 30th

I think this is our best summer lineup yet.

You must have noticed how hot it has been the past week. The sun has been unusually aggressive, impossible to escape as alimony payments, whether you’re indoors or out. It makes you understand why people in the sweltering deep South get a little peculiar and do things like sleep beside their dead fiances.

But on the upside, the slow-gathering respite at the day’s close brings a sort of epiphanic relief. You might find yourself picking up the guitar again, or staring at the neighborhood from your porch with the far regard you once perfected in art class.

Here is what resulted when the heat broke in our neck of the woods:

                      Grass-fed beef (Spanish Oak Ranches) roulade with aged Chaparral cheese (Rinconada Dairy), pesto, heirloom peppers & cipollini onions (Wingshadows Hacienda),marinated chioggia beets (Suzie’s Farm), baby turnips (La Milpa Organica).

                             Grilled pastured lamb loin (Christine and Jim Maguire), roasted Anaheim pepper (Suzie’s Organic Farm) & wheatberry (Massa Organics) salad, house made yogurt & mint (Suzie’s Farm) chutney.

                                                  Orange creamsicle trifle: house made pound cake soaked in navel orange (Paradise Valley Ranch), house made vanilla cream, mint (Suzie’s Organic Farm). The windows are open and there might easily be a few hours left in the sunset. Come inside.

Grass-fed roast sirloin (Spanish Oak Ranches), marinated chioggia beets (Suzie’s Organic Farm), baby turnip (La Milpa Organica), grilled cipollini onions (Wingshadows Hacienda), basil (Wingshadows Hacienda) pesto

This Friday at El Take It Easy, we are pleased to present our first chef’s dinner, with the Linkery’s own Max Bonacci and renowned Mexican chef Jair Téllez (of Laja and Merotoro); featuring pairings with wines from 33 Encinos winery near Tecate, and Cucapa beers from Mexical.

The dinner will be available from 6pm to about 11pm, maybe later, on Friday nite. Each of the six courses will be available a la carte, and also available with or without the wine/beer pairing; including pairings each course will cost between $9 and $15. While we will have our full selection of drinks available, at most only one or two dishes from the usual El Take It Easy food menu will be available on Friday so that we can present this special event.

Whole local spot prawn | 33 Encinos Sauvignon Blanc | 14

Local pastured chicken egg, rabbit bacon | cask-conditioned Cucapá Barleywine with tequila chips | 9

Local pastured goose | Cucapá Obscura | 10

Grass-fed Angus beef tenderloin | 33 Encinos Grenache/Cabernet/Petite Sirah | 15

Grass-fed California goat | Cucapá Chupacabra | 12

Hot chocolate custard | Cucapá Honey Ale | 9

also available | Pork belly tacos | 8

everything subject to change

I think you’ll find this a great opportunity not only to enjoy some great dishes, beer and wine, but also to enjoy the work of two chefs who are, in my opinion, spearheading a new way to think about cuisine in our region.

Grilled grass-fed coulotte steak (Spanish Oak Ranches), Brandywine tomato (Suzie’s Organic Farm), fried plantain, pickled local nopales

Fried vanilla bean custard, local citrus (Schaner Farms & Paradise Valley Ranch), cinnamon semifreddo

These are some beautiful squash blossoms we received from Suzie’s. We decided to stuff them with queso fresco and smoked Pacific oysters from Sol Azul, batter them with Green Flash Belgian Brown Ale, then fry them! Hello!

House cured Geneva salami from Jim Neville graces the meat plate tonite, along with house pickled veg and semolina crostini.

Another winner! Pancetta flatbread with house cured Berkshire pork pancetta from Eden Farms with roasted corn, Pt. Reyes Farmstead Toma, heirloom tomatoes from Suzie’s, and Opal basil from Wingshadows Hacienda. Yummm…ahhh…perks of the job!!

Celebrate Bastille Day at El Take It Easy, where we are hosting happy hour to benefit Outdoor Outreach from 6pm-8pm.

Drafts will be $3.50, Micheladas will be $4.50, house wine for $5/glass, and when you say that you’re there for the event, we’ll donate 20% of your tab to the amazing San Diego nonprofit group, Outdoor Outreach.

See you there!

Well, it looks like Jay’s previous blog post proved prophetic as the host South Africans took home the gold in the 2010 WCoS with their fantastic Boerewors, a smoky mixture of pork, beef, and lamb. And for the first time, the host country has taken home gold in the WCoS. Linguica, we’re putting you on notice!!

For those who care about second and third, the Slovenian Kulen took home second place and the Slovakian Klobasa took third. Way to go, Eastern Bloc!

And, after an extremely strong showing in the group stage, the Australian Kransky just completely collapsed in the later rounds. Sometimes a loss like that is hard to shake off, but that’s what separates champions from also-rans, no?

As commissioner, I’d like to extend a great deal of thanks to all of you folks who came in to help determine the winners of each match, as well as the 32 nations in the tournament for providing us with a national sausage (we took a few liberties with some of the African countries), and huge ups to our kitchen staff for keeping all these snags straight and in plentiful amounts.

Looking forward to 2014, I can only imagine the WCoS will be even more dialed in at that point. I’ve also told Jay, we can open another restaurant in two years, three years, or five years, but not in four years.

There’s a big buzz in town about the upcoming street art exhibit at MCASD, and work from leading street artists has been popping up all over town.

Is this flurry of installations related to why there’s a new mural on our wall at the Linkery today? I don’t know, but I know I dig it.

In addition to the beloved squash nuggets on the menu, tonite we added this dipped-squash concotion:

Green Flash Belgium Brown-battered squash blossoms (Suzie’s Organic Farm), smoked Pacific oysters (Sol Azul) & queso fresco, carrot (Wingshadows Hacienda) & oregano (Schaner Farms) slaw

There’s also pastured hot wings, and fried/smoked pastured chicken tonite, if you can’t get enough batter from just squashes.

Every time the kitchen makes semifreddo, I bother them for an explanation of how it’s made. It’s easy enough to remember–egg whites and sugar and whatever characteristic ingredient they select for the night–but there’s this other thing that I can’t wrap my head around. Having asked them for the fourth or hundredth time last night about it, I decided that empirical inquiry would probably never get me anywhere, so I decided to go at the question inductively.

I’ll spare you the details. (You’re welcome.)  Like most conundrums, the answer is an inch wide and a mile deep. It’s that thing that specific foods do to specific people–their tastes and textures racing through the limbic system with fire in their wake, on their way to the hippocampus and the amygdala to decorate with the dog-eared posters of a dim childhood.

Semifreddo means “half-frozen,” which you smart kids already figured out; it’s called that because traditionally it contains ingredients like liqueur or crushed cookies, so that you can’t completely freeze it. It looks like ice cream but behaves like cotton candy, which proved to be what made it so nostalgically mesmerizing. You put it in your mouth and it kind of snap-crackle-pops and then it’s gone. And if it’s hanging out with the season’s readiest nectarines simmered in wildflower honey, you immediately want some more. It will melt your neuroses even as it melts in your mouth.

                                                 Semolina bread pudding with nectarine (Smit Orchards), wildflower honey (Temecula Honey Co.) and house made cinnamon semifreddo. And also a mint leaf.

Now, about navy beans. Perfect for a July 4th follow-up menu, the legume formerly known as the “pea bean” got a brand new bag in the early 20th century when Uncle Sam started fueling his sailors on them. Out here on the west coast, we tend to call them “cannellini beans,” owing to that crush on all things Mediterranean that we nursed during the late 90s. But east coasters might carry a similar amygdalic torch for the smell of these little dudes simmering in a pot of tomato-stained ham stock, releasing their starches so that after half a day on the stove, it’s as thick as pudding and warm as a blanket.

                             Navy bean (Giusto’s Vita-Grain) soup with smoked Berkshire ham (Eden Farms), chives (Suzie’s Farm) and Grana Padano.

Get here quick.

Today brought us some love from the Toronto Star. I had forgotten about their visit… the writer and her brother came out from Canada last summer I think. They were super cool people, I’m glad they liked it here.

In other news, the sun is shining! Right here in North Park. I know it’s difficult to believe after the last couple weeks of gloom, but I swear that it’s true.

Americans generally believe that food comes from farmers, oil goes in cars, and that our country’s governance is animated by principles which make us unique in the firmament of contemporary societies. Sixty years ago, these things may have been largely true, but since then everything has changed except for the story we let ourselves believe.

The actual mechanisms by which our lives and culture are shaped, are not particularly hidden, but they don’t make sense to us because we still think (among other vestigial beliefs) that plants are grown from sunlight; so we ignore all that we see. To the point where we live in a dreamworld: everything that exists, we don’t understand; and everything we understand, doesn’t exist.

If you’ve read this far, you are in the tiny percentage of people who would choose not to live in a dream. Everyone else has moved on to reading about America’s next food star.

Here’s what has changed since the middle of the 20th Century. Our food system — and thus the very base our economy as a whole — is now driven by a small number of large corporations that do one or more of the following:

* develop seeds which can only be used one time (because, for instance, the seeds mature into sterile plants)
* convert fossil fuels into energy which can be accessed by plants, in lieu of good soil
* convert fossil fuels and similar inputs into pesticides, growth hormones, and other facilitators of agricultural yield
* process inedible agricultural products (mainly field corn and soybeans) into processed food and livestock feed
* convert livestock feed into meat at feedlots (and, increasingly, fish farms)

These companies, as a group, make their profits — and, incidentally, obtain control of our food supply — by working in concert with our policymakers to replace small family farms which grew many different crops, with much larger, consolidated farms which grow only one or two crops (usually corn and soybeans, sometimes other commodity crops like wheat, rice, or alfalfa).

Since this group of large corporations controls the costs of all the inputs to the farm (the modern farmer has no seed lines and must buy them each year; his soil is dead so he must buy petroleum-based fertilizers), and the same group of corporations buys all the outputs of the farm (to process into animal feed and human food), they can ensure that the new, larger farms are operated at a loss — with the farmers brought to break-even through government subsidies contained in the Farm Bill.

The farmers’ financial unsustainability guarantees that smaller farms will continue to fail in competition with bigger farms (who enjoy slightly better economies of scale), which continues to reduce the number of farms and increase the size and predictability of the remaining farms.

Over generations, millions of people in vital agricultural towns are quietly dispossessed and the towns shuttered. In the American Midwest, each generation of young adults may leave their now-dying town in search of “opportunity”, perhaps by moving to a regional small city, or by attending a land-grant university and moving to an exurb or large city. In the last 60 years, this process has been effectively laid waste to the Corn Belt, and to much of California’s Central Valley, and many other areas throughout America.

We grandchildren and great-grandchildren of iconic independent farmers, now often work in flaccid “knowledge-based” industries that produce little of value. But we nonetheless serve our function: to produce goods, and to buy the products of the food industry (and to a certain extent the consumer products industry) in order that we might continue to live. The New Food can be produced in staggering quantities. and human populations can thus be induced to grow, and labor, and pay.

Having conquered the land of the United States, the titans of food expanded beyond our borders. With the passing of NAFTA in the late 20th century, the fertile lands of Mexico were opened to these corporations, which worked with governments in both countries to repeat the successes of Iowa and Nebraska. Now, farmers in the cradle of maize itself no longer have the ability to sustain the most important crop in their country, without annually purchasing seeds from Monsanto.

With no access to a robust infrastructure for cubicle workers, displaced rural Mexicans created a different kind of pressure, that of overcrowded cities and agonizing joblessness. This was a huge positive feedback loop for the food companies, as now, a byproduct of their industry — masses of unemployed young men with agricultural backgrounds — perfectly matched a necessary input for their factories: countless disposable workers willing to abide danger, dismemberment, and backbreaking labor for meager pay. Young men, denied legal standing and thus any bargaining power, came north to work in thankless jobs in slaughterhouses and factory farms. Good taquerias appeared in Arkansas and North Carolina, costs at the food producers fell, and profits begat profits.

This system of replacing soil-based agriculture with petroleum-based agriculture has proven to be the most effective mechanism in human history at generating what economists call “wealth”. “Wealth”, in this context, is a measure of how rapidly a society of people can turn unique, essentially irreplaceable organic resources (such as ecosystems, eons-old fossils, and living soil) into short-lived products (such as automobiles, McMansions and hedge funds). In other words, the industrial concept of wealth is a measure of how effectively we break the sustainable processes of life and propel them into entropy. Our modern food production system, which has as its very essence the destruction of the cycle of life, has created wealth like nothing in the previous dreams of mankind.

Viewing the massive riches piled up in the US by this system, societies around the globe have adopted the same model. Rural Chinese flooding into cities to work in factories making cheap junk for overseas clients? That is the picture of a society figuring out how to make it big. The EU, India, every society that is able to do so, partners with multinational corporations and adopts this system, leading off with technology called, without irony, the Green Revolution.

This process — displacing people from the land, and putting them to work, by their own volition, for the corporate State, generating practically infinite wealth for its trustees — can continue indefinitely, as long as copious amounts of fossil fuel and water are available. Which means that, as supplies of easily-obtained petroleum dwindle, our stewards will take ever-more extreme steps to obtain to what remains. Whether it’s extracting oil from tar sands in Canada, deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, or overseas military adventures, no step is too extreme for a machine that will collapse, taking down the whole of our civil structure, if it is not fed enough oil.

Some societies with more oil than military strength see this kabuki playing out, and look for radical alternatives to the obvious endgame in which they become a vassal state to a technological power such as the US or China (cf. Hugo Chávez and nuclear Iran). Others (Mexico, Saudi Arabia) accept their fate, and sell themselves to the system, providing their upper classes entry into the global elite.

***

So what happens now? Obviously, while global populations continue to explode, access to new oil is getting more difficult, as witnessed by the recent events in the Gulf of Mexico. If our current pace continues, at some point the system will collapse, and such a collapse is not likely to be pretty. With neither oil nor soil, food will not grow. The rich will be facing the prospect of poverty, and the poor will be facing starvation. These conditions do not typically lead to blissful relations within a society.

Our best hope, as a culture, to thrive after the breakdown, is that we progress enough in dismantling the system beforehand, that we may have partial shelter from the storm.

This shelter will be found in older, more sustainable, ways of living, and all around us people are becoming, ever-so-slowly, more conscious of the possibilities. The people you hear of and see who are taking the time to develop urban gardens and polycultural farms, to make things by hand, to preserve and pickle and cure their food, to ride bicycles — these are people who are providing hope and humanity for the future. Their choices and suggestions are a ray of sunlight peeking through a sky of deep, gray, tar.