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Foie gras and Illegal Immigrants
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
The other day, we were doing one more time what on Sunday will become illegal in California: eating foie gras in a restaurant. Pan seared foie gras “traditionally raised in Sonoma, California,” served with poached local apricots. I’d go to jail for this anytime. We were sitting at the edge of San Francisco, looking at the Bay and the Bay Bridge draped across it, and we were talking—when we weren’t preoccupied by the divine, unctuous foie gras—about sweet corn and illegal immigrants.
Foie gras is a dish the Greeks already enjoyed, and I don’t mean the austerity Greeks under Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreou, but the Greeks that fought off the Persians. And it’s one of the many paradoxes in California—a state that has absolutely everything except a decent government and a balanced budget. Lobbied by well-meaning people, I suppose, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his infinite wisdom, signed a law in 2004 that made the sale and production of products derived from force-fed birds illegal. But he gave us some time to adjust to this harsh new life: the law wouldn’t take effect until July 1, 2012. OK, it’s banned in other countries too—Italy, the UK, and Germany for example—and Chicago experimented with a ban for a couple of years.
Force-feeding hapless geese and ducks—gavage as it’s called—is certainly gruesome, but so is just about anything else that has to do with meat. Ever watch an orca hunt and eat a sea lion? It’s brutal out there, and the food chain knows no mercy and has no human sentiments. We use drones to bomb people in distant countries, but when it comes to the sensuous pleasure of two slices of foie gras, we get squeamish.
A lugubrious moment: eating the final but to-die-for products of a mini-industry that had been exterminated by the government; and California still has double-digit unemployment. There were a number of us. The guy across from me was in charge of the wine. He knew his way around Bay Area vintners, was a farmer, and had a degree in economics.
He was talking about sweet-corn and the harvest that had started some time ago. If you’re a city guy like me, listening to a farmer over superb wine and foie gras is fascinating. Sweet corn, the result of careful crossbreeding, is very fragile, he said. Unlike other varieties of corn, it has to be harvested by hand because machines damage it. And it has a short shelf life. To extend the shelf life—the secret to doing business with big customers like Costco and Safeway—you have to harvest it at night. If you cool sweet corn from 72° to 34°, it lasts a lot longer than if you have to cool it from 107° to 34°.
One of the biggest challenges, he said, was lining up the farmworkers, 75 of them a day during harvest season. Subcontractors hired and took care of the workers, but every year it was getting more difficult. Most, if not all of them, were illegally in the country, he said. They worked from 7 PM till 3 AM under floodlights. It was piecework, averaging about $15 per hour. But with the crackdown on illegal immigrants, finding enough workers has become difficult, he said.
“Can’t you hire some people from Oakland or Stockton who’ve been out of a job for years?” someone asked.
“We tried, but man, no one wants to do this kind of work. It’s hard. After an hour, they give up ... if they even come out in the first place.”
“But 15 bucks an hour, that’s pretty good, compared to minimum wage.”
“They don’t have the skills, the stamina. You’ve got to be very productive to make this kind of money.”
Pink clouds drifted across the evening sky. A group of girls rollerbladed by. Life was good.
“And if the government ever gets rid of the illegals, or if they get scared and go back to Mexico on their own,” he said as he poured everyone some more wine, “we have to shut down our farm.”
And that’s where we all had conflicted thoughts. We loved sweet corn and couldn’t envision summer without it—and whatever we thought about illegal immigrants, we did want to have our sweet corn.
“Everyone who grows anything that has to be picked by hand,” he said, “has the same problem.”
It didn’t take long for the conversation to link this issue to the demise of the California foie gras industry, and which government would be willing to kill yet another and this time much bigger industry, and people wondered about our politicians who were now, more than ever, the best that money could buy. But it isn’t just a US phenomenon. It’s universal, as we can see in this hilarious video by my two favorite Australian comedians, Clarke & Dawe,.... “The Key to Good Governance.”
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Don't worry about shutting down the farms. The government has already done that. Drove from SF to Bakersfield last week. Lots of fallow land in the Central Valley for lack of water which is being withheld because of an endangered fucking smelt. You couldn't make this shit up. You really have to live here to fully grasp the political insanity that has eviscerated the late, great state of California. Two days ago in LA, the teachers union defeated a proposal which would make it easier to fire a teacher accused of sexually abusing children. We rank 49th out of 50 states designated as business friendly. Businesses, jobs and people are leaving in droves, the tax base has collapsed. This is California today thanks to 35 years of "progressive" government. Sheer madness.
fish above humans
The smelt are merely a politically convenient excuse to steal from one group to give to another (after an appropriate percentage is retained by the "regulators", called gangsters in another era). The politically connected farmers that get the water no longer have the ones on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley to compete with.
California, thanks to bountiful natural resources, has always been an excellent place to steal and get away with it if one had the necessary political connections.
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Octopus_and_the_Big_Four
Let me get this straight: (A) These chumps comply with the foie gras law by having a bacchanal feast the last day before the law goes into effect (largely because they can't or won't do the work themselves to make foie gras I assume). (B) Feel it's fine to hire illegals and foist the costs off onto the rest of society, and, to add insult to injury, rationalize that struggling Americans (or even kids) won't take $15 hour jobs (i.e., tax free ones). Therefore, in order to eat tasty food, they must comply with the law for foie gras, yet on the other they must break it for sweet corn? What a bunch of hypocritical sissy sh_theads.
Not to worry -- you will probably still be able to get your foie gras across the border in Nevada. The views at Lake Tahoe are just as nice as the ones at SF. And you needn't worry about Planet Earth running out of hypocritical sissy sh_theads in the foreseeable future. As long as you have the 3 Ps, (politicians, preachers, and pundits) they will never be scarce, unfortunately.
These sort of laws, which are exceedingly numerous, are intended to enrich one group at the expense of another. They're merely transfer programs. For example:
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_2,_Standard...(2008)
The "bacchanal feast" the day before Prohibition went into effect was a duzzy I would wager.
Both legal and "illegal" mexican-americans are heading back to Mexico as their job market is improving faster than ours.
If you believe 'mexicans', illegal or otherwise, are 'heading back to Mexico', you're getting too much exposure to the MSM. Just another meme that .gov wants us to believe.
yeah, I knew a few that did. My liberation day from Cali is July 22, can't wait.
Also, back in the early '90's, I was hired at a power plant in Cali right out of the US Navy. Most all the employees were Mexicans. They told me they worked and also drew unemployment. I asked them how they could do this and they said they were using different SS ID numbers.
The Mex looks at like if the government allows them to do this, it's not a crime.
Likewise, but on a much larger scale, the Wall St. Jooze look at theft like if the government allows them to do this, it's not a crime. The "penalties" are, to paraphrase Justice Roberts, "just a tax". And a damn small tax at that when one compares it with it the theft income.
Fucking classic Marin County liberal twits. Some of the worst kind of opportunists.
Parasites that can't survive without someone productive subsidizing them.
Way past time to refresh and fertilize that tree of liberty.
This article reeks of Marin smugness; I think I have to hurl. All I heard was a parasite slobbering all over its hosts, Mexicans in this case.
Exactly. Hire an American and pay taxes? I'll stop growing corn first. Fucking Joo "Farmer".
Which came first? Sweet corn or Mexican illegal pickers? Somehow I think the corn can first.
"And that’s where we all had conflicted thoughts. We loved sweet corn and couldn’t envision summer without it—and whatever we thought about illegal immigrants, we did want to have our sweet corn."
So there we go, the money sentence(s). Terribly conflicted thoughts abound. On the one hand we have this, on the other we have that. And whatever we thought about illegal immigrants........well, we just have to have our sweet corn......now don't we? Thus it's all about how big bad government stands between me and my sweet corn.
Sounds like a really bad country and western song. Cue the hound dogs, pickup trucks and geetars.
"Behind every sucessful farmer is a wife that works in town."
I think the "point" has been "phrased" wrong. This isn't about illegal immigrants, this is about sustainable food production and supply.
Factory farms with monolithic crops are NOT sustainable without "dirt cheap" labor (not being able to earn enough to provide for basic necessities like food, shelter and clothing) and cheap energy. This is why the "family farm" has all but disappeared.
Interesting times ahead......
The illegals are what are blocking the technological progress that would allow for mechanically picked sweet corn. That, and it doesn't help that the guy thinks that a subcontractor is meant to solve his liability (and if he hired citizens, benefits) problem - by offloading the blame on Someone Else. Neither he, the contractor, nor the illegals he hires (by virtue of the contractor) are innocent parties as they are all complicit in breaking the law - as well as blocking the technological progress that would allow citizens to be hired.
Either folks like this need to adapt to doing this legally with citizens and machine or adapt to the lifestyle of prison.
Not a grower, are you Sethstorm? LOL, just joking- it was a rhetorical question as its quite clear that your knowledge of food production if distilled into physical form would be insufficient to paint the bottom of a bottle cap.
Machines dont friggin' work for everything. The answer to all of lifes issues is not always technology, as hard as it is for the average urbanite techophile to comprehend there are aspects of food production that are either done by hand, or not done at all.
There is no machine on earth that can, for example, test my watermelons for ripeness. It takes an at least semi-experienced human eye capable of discerning multiple factors on the fruit and the plant itself to know when it has reached optimum ripeness.
I agree that illegals in agriculture are seriously bad news, but until the river of free stuff that sustains the largely useless urban population is cut off, they will not do the work. Thats fine with me and good for business as I can, will, and currently do that stuff and if those growers go down in flames my opportunity expands, and so will my prices to the urban zombie hordes. The more farmers who rely on illegals fail, the happier I will be.
Fuck "the law". People have a right to do as they please, hire whom they please, and travel wherever they wish in order to find work. We need a market economy, not some centrally planned bullshit economy based on made-up "laws". The only real law is life, liberty, and property.
As long as you allow communities to have their local laws I am all for it, ie. Arizona anti-immigration law should stand because that's what the local people want, the more local the better, if say my community would not wish to have any blacks or hispanics in it, it should be allowed to have (local)laws against it ofc those local laws would apply to locals and say a traveler or visitor would 1st have to be told what the (local)law is before he could be prosecuted for it
Ya know, many of my neighbors have much nicer properties than mine, some with swimming pools, hunting acreage, etc. I think I'll just jump the fence and help myself to all of their amenities. People should be free to roam where they please, do anything they want, anytime they want. Property lines? Just an abstract construct. National borders? Pshaw! I have a 'right' just because I think, therefore I am, to do as I please and to hell with 'laws' or fences or 'borders'. /sarc off
How true.
And Europeans who do not want Indo Europeans (Asians) should be allowed to do that.
Indo Europeans could pack up, them and their debt to their place.
Good luck and no thanks for depleting Europe's from its resources.
yes, all women in burquas and slave labour galore! Wowie, back to the feudal ages with a vengeance! Local law, vigilante law, tyrannical to minorities; Sparta! Of course they invented it. You crossed their boundaries at your peril ! Civilization's clock moves back.
You are right. Cheap labor has kept U.S. farmers from mechanizing. European agriculture is far more mechanized than the U.S. And when I say cheap labor I mean cheap for the farmer. The farmer doesn't pay for hospitalization, incarceration, retirement or and other expenses associated with the illegal immigrant labor.
Goldman's european chairman, who is on the UN migration board, said europe needs to flood in more illegals to become more multicultural - ie less white.
The invasion of illegals into the west is to allow the elites total control over the serfs.
Who gives a fuck about the law anymore? Certainly not the people on Wall St., the big banks like JPM and BAC, or any of the politicians.
Steal billions and pay a few million in fines or pick some corn and go to jail. What'll it be? I think I'd prefer the billions if you don't mind. The stolen billions prevent millions of people from retiring with the money they thought they'd saved and millions more from living in the home they thought they owned. The corn? If the Mexicans don't pick it, nobody eats it.
"The law is what the nobles do"
F.Kafka.
Grow your own.
If I start growin' my own, it ain't gonna be fuckin' corn!