Laurels & lances: Franks, Zoom and food
Share this post:
Laurel: To good news on a bun. Who wasn’t crestfallen at the news that the Original Hot Dog Shop in Oakland had closed down? The Oakland eatery was a landmark with must-eat wieners and yes-please fries. So hearing that it was shutting down in April was a crushing blow to many amid the coronavirus lockdown. Not only was it closing, but people were robbed of that one last chance to get a nostalgic bite to go.
But then Mark Cuban, “Shark Tank” billionaire and Mt. Lebanon native who spent his freshman year at Pitt, swam in to give us all hope that the O would come back to life under his ownership.
“I can’t say it will happen but it’s not dead yet,” he told the Tribune-Review.
Let’s be frank, this is the kind of good news we could all sink our teeth into. And if Levin Furniture can come back from bankruptcy, anything is possible.
But hey, Mark? If you want to throw a vegan dog on the menu in answer to PETA’s request for a meat-free hot dog chain, that’s great. Just keep those Original dogs just they way they were.
Lance: To blatant disrespect. It’s hard enough to get people to engage with their government. No one goes to public meetings because they are fun. They aren’t. People go because they are important. For people to still make the effort during a quarantine situation is admirable.
Which makes it appalling that some of those meetings have been attacked by pranksters. Last week, the Leechburg school board meeting, held via the online platform Zoom, was blitzed with pornographic images.
This isn’t funny, not only because that isn’t the kind of thing that someone wants to see accidentally. It’s tragic because community engagement is something that needs to be fostered and fed like a seedling, and this kind of attack can easily squash it.
Laurel: To a program that makes sense. People don’t have enough food. Farmers have food. The solution seems obvious. Take the farm-fresh perishable products and get them into the hands of people who need them. That is what the Farmers to Families program — which held a distribution event Wednesday at the Westmoreland Fairgrounds that included U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue — is doing and it is exactly the right thing.
The pandemic shutdown disrupted logistics, as restaurants and other institutions declined but retail demand grew. When farmers were dumping oversupplies of milk, it wasn’t because people stopped consuming dairy — it was because the industry couldn’t instantly shift distribution. The meat industry has been similarly hit. This program tried to help both sides, purchasing up to $3 billion from farmers and boxing it up to hand over to those who need it.
“This is what America does best. It’s Americans helping Americans,” Perdue said.