Short-sightedness spells end of the world, pricey booze

In the time between the happy present and the moment of doom, we restaurant veterans would like to be able to relax with a shot of tequila and a beer. But this simple, innocent ambition is sideswiped by the law of unintended consequences—our present-tense-only thinking is represented in our current appetite for corn as fuel.

Those exalted twin pillars of modern intellectual life, the quarterly earnings statement and the political opinion poll, have the same problem: they speak only in the present tense. Their predictive value, without any other data, is nil; and the fact that they are minutely scrutinized and widely publicized is clear evidence that the world is coming to an end.

If what you see at the present moment is somehow more important than everything you’ve seen in the past or might see in the future, the perspective on the cosmos becomes a bit narrow. Think of a big, flat penny on a railroad track. It’s huge, it’s mangled, it’s funny-looking; and if you run to get it without thinking about what it looked like before and how the change came about, some of those adjectives could soon apply to you.

I blame television, of course. Not that this should come as any surprise—I blame television for lots of stuff. Attention deficit disorder? Television. Obesity epidemic? Television. The fall of Constantinople in 1453? Television. This exaltation of the “right-now” and the ability to select a better one with a click is, in our day, the accepted standard. There ain’t no past to speak of, no matter what a few paelo-geeks say about the Burgess Shale. And if the world gets hotter for our kids, well, we won’t be around to see it, and we’ve paid a fortune for their damn swimming lessons anyway.

So we’re inarguably doomed, but I still have a few complaints to voice about the process. You’d expect this from a restaurant person—of the 30 or so joints that I have worked in, perhaps two or three still survive, yet I can’t think of a single one that I can’t grumble about at length. (I noticed this characteristic in my grandpa when he was in his mid-90s—he’d be warning you in lurid detail about what a sleazeball some guy was, and how you couldn’t trust him with the backside of a boar hog, and I’d gradually assemble enough clues to realize that the man in question had died in 1917.)

In the time between the happy present and the moment the Visigoths come over the wall, a few of us—restaurant veterans, mostly, but perhaps one or two others—would like to be able to relax with a shot of tequila and a beer. We’re not asking for artisan loaves and Cirque du Soliel; we’ve been on the selling side of the bread-and circuses gimmick and can’t be fooled too easily. We just want to sit on our stools and water our cynicism as we watch the Vikings implode again, and to sagely extract from their bewildered futility a metaphor for the rest of the universe.

And even this simple, innocent ambition is sideswiped by the law of unintended consequences. My grandpa, a farmer who was rabid in his commitment to American agriculture, rigid in his belief in self-sufficiency and hard work, who was convinced that FDR was a communist and that government handouts caused moral leprosy (I never did ask if this included farm subsidies), would probably have been thrilled to see corn growers finally making a decent living.

However, he believed in feeding people. Oddly enough, one of the most touching nods of approval I’ve ever gotten was his obvious pleasure that his hippie grandson had turned into a cook—a profession which, like his, involved long hours, physical effort, frequent impecunity, and a dedication to full stomachs. So I like to think that he would join me in thinking that a gas tank is a hell of a place to put a shot of corn whiskey.

And it’s not just “corn squeezin’s” that are getting the squeeze. I wasn’t kidding about my beer and bump: in Germany, the price of barley has doubled in the last two years, raising the price of barley malt, the substance which makes beer into beer. The culprit? Corn and canola, planted for biodiesel. In Mexico, farmers are burning fields of blue agave so they can plant corn. If this were a matter of whiskey supplanting tequila and mescal, I’d just sigh at the vagaries of popular taste, and order whatever’s cheap. But it’s hard to face the idea that my miserable automobile—the one that always needs a new clutch right before a vacation—now wants to drink my booze.