Oil companies are going all-in on petrochemicals — and green chemistry needs help to compete

Global oil consumption declined by roughly 9% in 2020 as the pandemic reduced business and pleasure travel, factory production and transportation of goods. This abrupt drop accelerated an ongoing shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

U.S. government forecasts show that oil use for transportation, industry, construction, heating and electricity is declining and will continue to drop in the coming years. This trend has enormous implications for the oil industry: As the International Energy Agency observed in 2020, “No oil and gas company will be unaffected by clean energy transitions.”

About 80% of every barrel of oil refined in the U.S. today is used to make gasoline, distillate (diesel) and jet fuel, with the rest going into petrochemical products. EIA

Many of these companies are trying to make up losses by boosting production of petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas. Today roughly 80% of every barrel of oil is used to make gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, with the rest going into petrochemical products. As demand for petroleum fuels gradually declines, the amount of oil used for that “other” share will grow.

This makes sense as a business strategy, but here’s the problem: Researchers are working to develop more sustainable replacements for petrochemical products, including bio-based plastics and specialty chemicals. However, petrochemicals can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost. As a biochemist working to develop environmentally benign versions of valuable chemicals, I’m concerned that without adequate support, pioneering green chemistry research will struggle to compete with fossil-based products.

This video from Austrian oil and gas company OMV shows how petrochemicals serve as building blocks for goods from pharmaceuticals to bike helmets.

Pivoting toward petrochemicals

Petrochemicals are used in millions of products, from plastics, detergents, shampoos and makeup to industrial solvents, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer and carpeting. Over the next 20 years, oil company BP projects that this market will grow by 16% to 20%.

Oil companies are ramping up to increase petrochemical production. In the Saudi Arabian town of Yanbu, for example, two state-owned companies, Saudi Aramco and Sabic, are planning a new complex that will produce 9 million metric tons of petrochemicals each year, transforming Arabian light crude oil into lubricants, solvents and other products.

These changes are happening across the global industry. Several Chinese companies are constructing factories that will convert about 40% of their oil into chemicals such as p-Xylene, a building block for industrial chemicals. Exxon-Mobil began expanding research and development on petrochemicals as far back as 2014.

The International Energy Agency projects that petrochemicals will account for one-third of growth in global oil demand through 2030 and half of growth in demand through 2050.

The promise of green chemistry

At the same time, in the U.S. and other industrialized countries, health, environmental and security issues are driving a quest to produce sustainable alternatives for petroleum-based chemicals. Drilling for oil and natural gas, using petrochemicals and burning fossil fuels have widespread environmental and human health impacts. High oil consumption also raises national security concerns.

The Department of Energy has led basic research on bioproducts through its national laboratories and funding for university BioEnergy Research Centers. These labs are developing plant-based, sustainable domestic biofuels and bioproducts, including petrochemical replacements, through a process called “metabolic engineering.”

Researchers like me are using enzymes to transform leafy waste matter from crops and other sources into sugars that can be consumed by microorganisms – typically, bacteria and fungi such as yeast. These microorganisms then transform the sugars into molecules, similar to the way that yeast converts sugar to ethanol, fermenting it into beer.

In the creation of bioproducts, instead of creating ethanol the sugar is transformed into other molecules. We can design these metabolic pathways to create solvents; components in widely used polymers like nylon; perfumes; and many other products.

My laboratory is exploring ways to engineer enzymes – catalysts produced by living cells that cause or speed up biochemical reactions. We want to produce enzymes that can be put into engineered bacteria, in order to make structurally complex natural products.

The overall goal is to put carbon and oxygen together in a predictable fashion, similar to the chemical structures created through petroleum-based chemistry. But the green approach uses natural substances instead of oil or natural gas as building blocks.

This isn’t a new concept. Enzymes in bacteria are used to make an important antibiotic, erythromycin, which was first discovered in 1952.

All of this takes place in a biorefinery – a facility that takes natural inputs like algae, crop waste or specially grown energy crops like switchgrass and converts them into commercially valuable substances, as oil refineries do with petroleum. After fermenting sugars with engineered microorganisms, a biorefinery separates and purifies microbial cells to produce a spectrum of bio-based products, including food additives, animal feed, fragrances, chemicals and plastics.

In response to the global plastic pollution crisis, one research priority is “polymer upcycling.” Using bio-based feedstocks can transform single-use water bottles into materials that are more recyclable than petroleum-based versions because they are easier to heat and remold.

Reducing the cost gap

To replace polluting goods and practices, sustainable alternatives have to be cost-competitive. For example, many plastics currently end up in landfills because they’re cheaper to manufacture than to recycle.

High costs are also slowing progress toward a bioeconomy. Today research, development and manufacturing are more costly for bioproducts than for established petrochemical versions.

Governments can use laws and regulations to drive change. In 2018 the European Union set an ambitious goal of sourcing 30% of all plastics from renewable sources by 2030. In addition to reducing plastic pollution, this step will save energy: Petroleum-based plastics production ranks third in energy consumption worldwide, after energy production and transport.

The U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) projects that chemists specializing in #greenchemistry are going to be in demand over the next decade. Sounds good to us! #NESSEjobs https://t.co/qRW57i5nQZ pic.twitter.com/FMsNiT0zLq

— ACS Green Chemistry Institute (@ACSGCI) May 12, 2021

Promoting bio-based products is compatible with President Biden’s all-of-government approach to climate change. Biomanufacturing investments could also help bring modern manufacturing jobs to rural areas, a goal of Biden’s American Jobs Plan.

But oil company investments in the design of novel chemicals are growing, and the chasm between the cost of petroleum-based products and those produced through emerging green technologies continues to widen. More efficient technologies could eventually flood existing petrochemical markets, further driving down the cost of petrochemicals and making it even harder to compete.

In my view, the growing climate crisis and increasing plastic pollution make it urgent to wean the global economy from petroleum. I believe that finding replacements for petroleum-based chemicals in many products we use daily can help move the world toward that goal.

Constance B. Bailey, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Being autistic may amount to a language difference — not an impairment

Experts generally agree that, no matter how many words you use, a large percentage of communication comes via nonverbal actions — facial expressions, body language, and so on. If you are autistic like me, that means you struggle with many aspects of this non-verbal communication.

Now, a new study now offers insights as to why that might be the case — though many autistic people say the study is reaffirming exactly what they’ve known for years.

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, suggested that those on the autism spectrum find it difficult to accurately identify angry facial expressions when they are displayed with the intensity and speed that neurotypicals find “normal.”

As the lead author of the study explained in a University of Birmingham news release, “We identified that autistic people had a specific difficulty recognizing anger which we are starting to think may relate to differences in the way autistic and non-autistic people produce these expressions. If this is true, it may not be accurate to talk about autistic people as having an ‘impairment’ or ‘deficit’ in recognizing emotion — it’s more that autistic and non-autistic faces may be speaking a different language when it comes to conveying emotion.”

PhD researcher Connor Keating, the lead author of the study, elaborated on this issue in an email to Salon where he discussed the so-called “double empathy problem.” This is the idea that empathy relies heavily on both how we instinctively express emotions and what we have grown to expect from previous social interactions — experiences that can be very different for autistic people. When that happens, there is a communication breakdown which upsets both autistics and allistics (non-autistic people).

“The double empathy problem was conceptualized by Damian Milton, an autistic academic,” Keating explained. “Many autistic individuals over the years have endorsed the double empathy idea, agreeing that it matches their own experiences.”

His study, he added, is the first “to show that a difficulty recognizing moving, rather than still, angry expressions is associated with autism, and not alexithymia.” Alexithymia is a condition related to autism that impacts emotional communication.

It is fair to say that many autistic people, when reading that, will probably react the same way that I did: Of course!

“As a kid I only understood obvious outright expressions of anger and aggression,” Jen Elcheson, a school support worker from Prince George BC Canada, told Salon by email. “Subtle ones? Forget it. Especially if the person had ambiguous body language.”

Elcheson recalled incorrectly thinking other people were being humorous when in fact they were expressing facetiousness.

“My response would just further piss them off,” Elcheson recalled. “Confusion, shame, and my own anger towards myself followed. I got it wrong, again!”

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Even as an adult nearing 40, Elcheson says it is a “struggle at times” to understand subtle non-verbal and sometimes even verbal cues. “I don’t always know what may be going on with someone who is not autistic,” Elcheson added. “I can usually understand fellow autistic just fine. Ditto for people who are otherwise neurodivergent, as I have other [neurodivergent] diagnoses as well.”

Alex Plank, founder of a popular forum site for neurodivergent people, observed that he often feels like he is speaking a different language from neurotypicals, particularly when it comes to emotions.

“I often have people think I’m being rude when I’m just being factual or trying to communicate urgency,” Plank explained in an email. He added that he often overlooks social customs such as remembering to greet someone or avoid talking over them.

“I’ve noticed when talking with other autistics, we tend to talk over each other and it works fine — we stop talking if we need to or the other person does,” he mused.

Indeed, this unexpected anger can be mystifying to those on the spectrum, and often seems to emerge entirely unprompted. Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu, a visiting scholar at Rice University who is also on the autism spectrum, recalled how both she and other autistic people often have the experience of communicating with people who suddenly become very angry.

“I would just be really confused,” Giwa-Onaiwu told Salon. “I didn’t understand where they were getting that vibe or what was happening because I’m thinking we’re holding a conversation and I’m not taking up whatever cue I guess I’m supposed to be picking up from their face or their body language.” This is more than a mere faux pas or embarrassment; as Giwa-Onaiwu observed, “it puts you in a really dangerous situation” because neurotypicals may not react well to an autistic person who does not correctly process their anger.

“I think they truly don’t understand that we are not perceiving what they’re perceiving,” she added.

Podcast host and life coach Danielle Sullivan (who is late-diagnosed autistic) expressed hope that the study would help people better understand the precise nature of how autistic people struggle.

“I think this study’s conclusions are absolutely correct,” Sullivan wrote to Salon. “Although emotional intelligence varies in autistic people (the same way it does in allistic people) as a whole, autistic folks don’t have impaired emotional intelligence. We do have a distinct and different language and expression for our emotions that can be just as hard for neurotypical to read in our faces as it is for us to read in neurotypical faces.”

For what it’s worth, not all autistic individuals feel this way. Iconic autism and animal rights advocate Temple Grandin, for instance, told Salon by email that “I have always been able to recognize anger. I use the tone of voice as the main indicator for anger.”

Either way, if there is one common theme from all of the conversations I’ve had with autistic individuals — both for this article and many, many others — it is that our neurology simply makes us different, not worse. As British psychologist and autism specialist Tony Attwood once wrote, “I see people with Asperger’s syndrome as a bright thread in the rich tapestry of life.”

Joe Biden, Donald Trump and the Weimar Republic: History’s dark lessons

If Donald Trump’s movement is destined to be America’s answer to Nazism, than the Joe Biden administration is currently a rough equivalent of the Weimar Republic — the unstable constitutional democracy that governed Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler. The comparison is imperfect, but the cautionary tale is still clear. There is an obvious risk that Biden and the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress will fail, and that Trump or a successor will take over and then cement themselves into power for at least the next generation. Every American who wants to avoid this — especially Biden and the leading Democrats in Congress — needs to learn the right lessons from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

It would require a medium-length academic article to lay out all the similar and dissimilar qualities of these two nations in these two periods. But for the purposes of understanding the threat posed by Trumpism, there are five key similarities:

1. Both sagas began with an incompetent right-wing ruler. In Germany’s case, they had the misfortune of being led by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who has been described as viewing “other people in instrumental terms,” as a “compulsive liar” and possessing “a limited understanding of cause and effect.” That sounds more than a little bit like Donald Trump, whose administration was plagued with scandal and who failed to effectively manage the COVID-19 pandemic. On both occasions, that ruler was eventually removed from power (through losing both World War I and the German Revolution in the case of the former and losing the 2020 election in the case of the latter).

2. Both stories continued because of a Big Lie. Hitler appealed to nationalist sentiments by claiming that Germany had actually won World War I but been betrayed behind the scenes by a conspiracy of socialists and Jews. Trump, who displays narcissistic traits and has spent years telling people that any election he loses is by definition stolen from him, has without evidence or any logical argument insisted that Biden cheated in 2020. Another defeated president might have been dismissed as a pathological sore loser, but Trump’s cult of personality is so strong that his Trumper tantrum has now become a defining part of Republicanism.

3. Both used their Big Lies to break democratic norms. In Hitler’s case, he became a de facto legal dictator shortly after rising to power. Because America has a much longer history of unbroken democratic government than Germany did in 1933, things will be trickier for the Trumpists. In Trump’s case, he became the first president to lose an election and refuse to accept the result (there have been 10 previous defeated presidents, and all accepted the voters’ verdict), as well as the first to incite an insurrection to stay in power. Trump is now reportedly fueling conspiracy theories that he could still overturn the election; just as significantly, Republicans are using his Big Lie to restrict voting for Democratic-leaning groups throughout the country. Through these methods, they will make it possible for Republicans to steal future elections — presidential and local — through means created to “fix” the problem they manufactured through their Big Lie. No doubt there will be many future Big Lies.

4. Both Hitler and Trump use fascist tactics to win over their supporters. These include appeals to nationalism, vilification of “out” groups and conditioning their followers to use self-expression as a substitute for authentic political self-agency. (It helps when they can create a cult of personality around the leader figure.)

5. Both may wind up using their legal troubles to create resurrection narratives. Hitler famously served nine months in prison for participating in a failed coup d’état known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Trump may go to prison for anything and everything from his own coup attempt to the numerous financial crimes alleged against him. If he’s convicted, he will likely be held up as a martyr; if he doesn’t, that fact will be cited as vindication.

Because of these similarities, it is unfortunately conceivable that Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (generously assuming he has not already done so) and the Trumpists will win every future election because of their various voter suppression laws and Orwellian propaganda. We face a future in which Trump’s brand of right-wing politics is not only empowered, but virtually impossible to dislodge. My guess is the process will start gaining steam soon, win some important victories in the 2022 midterm elections and then climax when either Trump or a Trumpist is elected in 2024.

How can Biden make sure this does not happen?

He must recognize the gravity of the crisis and prioritize neutralizing it. That means making sure Republicans can’t cover up the truth about Trumpism’s anti-democratic agenda, and that voting rights are protected.

None of that will be possible as long as Republicans in the Senate can filibuster legislation to death. Even though Democrats have a theoretical majority in a 50-50 Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, two Democrats — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have infamously refused to support ending the filibuster. Their rationale is that of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously gave part of Czechoslovakia to Germany and thereby emboldened Hitler: Like Chamberlain, they want to appease the far right extremists in their midst. Today this means legislation that would protect voting rights, investigate the Trumpist coup effort and help America’s economy recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is being unnecessarily thwarted or watered down by Republicans bent on reclaiming power.

While Biden has expressed frustration with Manchin and Sinema, that is nowhere near enough. Biden and other leading Democrats need to make it clear that if Manchin and Sinema do not support ending the filibuster, they will suffer serious political consequences. The Trumpists understood this principle when they stripped Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming of her position in the House Republican leadership because she wouldn’t back the Big Lie. In their quest to Make America Forever Trumpist, they will tolerate no dissent. When it comes to what Democrats must do to stop Manchin and Sinema, however, the goal is not to suppress dissent but to make sure that those who do suppress dissent can’t rise to power. If Manchin and Sinema refuse to do something reasonable to stop them, the Democratic Party must make them suffer politically for it. To quote John F. Kennedy’s final speech (which he never got to deliver because he was assassinated: “This is a time for courage and a time of challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed.”

Consider this nightmare scenario: Sinema and Manchin switch parties and Democrats lose control of the Senate. As bad as that might be, it would also force Republicans to shoulder some of the blame for political gridlock, and might be preferable to Democrats being seen as impotent because two bad senators are blocking their entire agenda. If Biden can’t get Manchin and Sinema to stop supporting the filibuster and back his agenda, then they deserve to be effectively treated as Republicans even if they remain nominal Democrats. Biden can still creatively use executive power to at least somewhat follow this next step. (I elaborate on that here.)

That step is to make sure that he adequately addresses the people’s legitimate needs. The Weimar Republic fell, in part, because of widespread economic hardships that the government simply could not fix. Biden needs to make sure that the vast majority of Americans feel economically secure, safe from threats foreign and domestic (like terrorists and pandemics), and protected from long-term existential crises like global warming, plastic pollution and income inequality. Any legislation passed anywhere in the nation that limits citizens’ access to voting must be stricken from the books. Lies spread in bad faith to discourage voting, from Trump claiming he won in 2020 to myths about mail-in ballots, have to be proactively rebutted.

It is unrealistic to expect Biden to be a revolutionary even if Manchin and Sinema do stop playing God, but he is capable of doing a lot entirely on his own. Whenever possible, he must be bold.

Finally, Biden must make sure that we never forget Jan. 6. Just as George W. Bush’s presidency was defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, so too will Joe Biden’s be defined by whether he can make 1/6 into a cornerstone of our political consciousness. If he can do that, he will be able to make sure that Trumpism’s anti-democratic philosophy — which poses a far more dangerous threat to America than Islamist terrorism — is known by all but its followers for what it is.

This won’t be easy, but we don’t have a choice. A century ago one of the world’s great powers collapsed into authoritarian evil with astonishing rapidity: While monarchists and major capitalists believed Adolf Hitler was a clown they could control, the opponents were divided, confused and ineffective. Aspects of that history are repeating themselves, and the question now is whether we have learned from the mistakes of the past to alter the outcome.

Brother of QAnon conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn assumes command of US Army Pacific

According to Stars and Stripes, the brother of disgraced Gen. Michael Flynn, Gen. Charles Flynn, is assuming command of U.S. Army Pacific.

“Flynn — the younger brother of Michael Flynn, who briefly served as national security adviser under former President Donald Trump — took the reins from Gen. Paul LaCamera, who will move on to command U.S. Forces Korea,” reported Wyatt Olson. “Flynn arrived from Washington, D.C., where he had served since June 2019 as deputy chief of staff for Army operations, plans and training. He has been stationed in Hawaii numerous times, most recently as deputy commanding general at U.S. Army Pacific.”

Unlike his brother, Charles Flynn has not publicly embraced QAnon conspiracy theories or called for a military coup. However, he has not been without controversy — the Army tried to conceal the fact that he was involved in response planning to the Capitol riot in January.

Kyrsten Sinema faces a major ultimatum from one of her biggest supporters

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is facing a serious ultimatum from one of her biggest state supporters. According to HuffPost, former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods has now reached his breaking point with Sinema’s stance on the filibuster.

Woods, a former Republican who worked on late Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign but switched to the Democratic Party in 2018, endorsed Sinema during her election campaign in 2018. Now, he appears to be concerned about the decision he made to do so.

On Friday, June 4, Woods sounded off as he shared his concerns about Sinema’s unwavering support of the filibuster.

“I do think that Sen. Sinema and every senator should support ending the filibuster for the voting rights bill,” he said, adding, “To keep the Jim Crow filibuster while losing some of these basic voting rights that are central to our democracy is preposterous.”

“Sen. Sinema should know that, so should Sen. Manchin,” Woods said, referring to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has also been quite vocal about his opposition toward the filibuster’s removal. “At the end of the day, I’m very hopeful that they’ll come around and do the right thing. But if they don’t, then I don’t think they belong in the Senate anymore.”

Despite the ultimatum, heightened intraparty resistance, and criticism, Sinema has made it clear that she supports the measure. In a public statement released on Friday, the Arizona Democratic lawmaker doubled down on her belief as she works with Republican lawmakers’ efforts to preserve the filibuster.

“It is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation,” Sinema said Tuesday in Tucson, at an event with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “Rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies, the idea of the filibuster was created by those who came before to create comity and to encourage bipartisanship and work together.”

Replace the police: new response strategies for mental health crisis calls

By all accounts, in the early morning hours of March 23 last year, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Rochester, New York, man, was having a psychotic break. Prude’s fate was sealed after his brother, trying to help, called 911. Police responded by handcuffing the naked Prude, pinning him to the ground and suffocating him to death.

“Mr. Daniel Prude was failed by our police, our mental health care system, our society, and by me,” Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said during a press conference about the incident.

Over the past year, the use of 911 calls to dispatch police in psychiatric emergencies is coming under long-overdue scrutiny, and momentum is building to divert these calls to mental health crisis teams. Such reforms, advocates say, could have prevented interactions with law enforcement that ended the lives of Prude, Nicolas Chavez, Walter Wallace Jr., Angelo Quinto, Deborah Tanner, and countless others who were met with weapons rather than psych care.

People with untreated serious mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during an encounter with the cops than other civilians, according to research by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit supporting treatment for severe mental illness. The reason: Cops are usually not trained to adequately identify or understand psychosis. Rather, their training tells them to react to every encounter as a potential threat.

Justice reform and mental health advocates say sending mental health crisis teams to deal with psychiatric emergencies would save lives, although making widespread reforms like this one would likely strain mental health resources.

* * *

Responding to the shooting of 13-year-old Linden Cameron, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who was shot and seriously injured by a police officer in Salt Lake City last year, Utah recently passed a law creating a council to devise standard training for police crisis intervention teams statewide. More often, initiatives to divert police from psychological crises calls are happening at the city level. Last month, New York City announced the expansion of a six-month pilot program to reroute some of the more than 150,000 annual mental health calls from police officers to mental health experts and EMS. “We’re now convinced that this approach is going to work citywide,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the program during a recent budget briefing. A senior advisor to the mayor, Susan Herman, said that the city will continue to strengthen crisis prevention and establish a “health centered approach.”

De Blasio’s noting of this change in a budget meeting is significant. Law enforcement around the country is beginning to see reform in this area through a cost saving lens. According to a 2017 national survey of police and sheriff’s departments, 10% of law enforcement budgets — over $900 million nationally — were spent responding to people with mental illness, accounting for more than 20% of total law enforcement staff time.

Measures to move cops away from intervening in mental health crises largely have the backing of city leaders and law enforcement. Praising New York City’s launch of its pilot program in November, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said officers “applaud the intervention by health professionals in these nonviolent cases and as always stand ready to assist.”

In the wake of outrage over Daniel Prude’s death, the city of Rochester is sending the Person in Crisis Team, not police, to mental health crises. Denver, Albuquerque, and Portland, Oregon, are also moving toward unarmed response for mental crisis calls. In Los Angeles, the LAPD’s Mental Evaluation Unit has for years been using two-person teams of clinicians and officers to de-escalate crises, but the department recently launched a pilot program to divert more 911 calls to crisis counselors and get teams into the field faster.

Some cities are using a program established 30 years ago in Eugene, Oregon, as a model. The program, Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS), launched by Eugene’s White Bird Clinic in 1989, consists of a medic and a crisis worker, neither carrying weapons.

CAHOOTS received around 24,000 calls last year, and teams requested police backup only 150 times, according to Tim Black, director of consulting at White Bird Clinic, who said he’s getting more calls from cities of all sizes to help divert police from “quality of life” and mental health calls.

“If someone shouts in the streets, the response is to call the cops,” Black said. “Mattress on the sidewalk? Call the cops. We have to get out of that mindset.”

But if mental crisis teams appear to be an obvious way to save money, time and especially lives, why has it taken so long to take police out of the picture? According to Black, public awareness and pressure to change — and a year of protests over police violence — have broken through the inertia of law enforcement.

“The response is coming from the public to demand this,” Black said. “If we wanted law enforcement to make these changes we would be waiting a long time.”

But changes can be made. Before the rise of ambulance companies, it was police officers who typically took ill people to the hospital.

“You also need places to take people in crisis other than a hospital or jail,” Black added, noting that more low-barrier shelters, sobering centers and stabilization centers where people in crisis can chill out for several hours are useful alternatives.

* * *

Making these changes will likely put a strain on resources, according to Lisa Dailey, acting executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, who says that police reforms need to go hand in hand with changes to mental health systems.

“The patient is like a hot potato,” Dailey told Capital & Main. “[Law enforcement] doesn’t want this responsibility, but the mental health system doesn’t want it either. The philosophy of state departments of health is no involuntary detainment. That makes it more likely that they will end up in the criminal justice system.”

Several resources and policy changes are needed, said Dailey: more beds at inpatient facilities, more workers at outpatient centers and time enough for patients to stay until they stabilize. Eliminating the loophole allowing Medicaid to reject paying for treatment at mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities with more than 16 beds is another policy change Dailey advocates.

“States have no incentive to fund facilities with state dollars, then ultimately they close facilities. The whole [mental health] system is underfunded and poorly organized,” notes Dailey.

The wide ranging George Floyd Justice in Policing Act currently making its way through Congress focuses on curbing police abuses and the use of chokeholds, but does not reroute mental health crises away from police.

That’s fine, say advocates like Black, who says different communities have distinct needs for mental health and addiction services. “Listen to community stakeholders, because that is where the truth is, people with lived experience.”

A majority of the public is willing to make a financial investment on the federal level. A 2020 survey from the Alliance for Safety and Justice found more than three-quarters of voters support using federal funding to expand mental health crisis responses to divert mental health 911 calls away from police. Mental health and police reform advocates have been calling for these changes for years. Now, with renewed scrutiny on police throughout the nation, they say there’s no need to wait.

I killed the beloved hero of my books, and reader reactions were intense. Would I do it again?

In November 2013, the third book in my bestselling “Divergent” series, “Allegiant,” had been on the shelves for a few weeks, and I was on a run. It was cold, and I had lost my keys somewhere along my path. As I waited for my husband to drive back to the apartment to let me in, I sat on my back steps and tweeted about my misery, as one does. Within seconds, I received a reply: I hope you freeze to death. Without hesitating, I blocked the user and closed Twitter.

My reaction was automatic. At that point, I had been receiving angry messages — even threats — for weeks. Some were obvious hyperbole — like the person who threatened to “chop my breasts off” — and some were more frightening. It’s harder to tell the difference than you’d think, and unlike many other women on the internet dealing with casual vitriol, I hadn’t had much practice. Up until then, my mentions were pretty tame, nothing outside the norm for a new author. This intense anger was provoked by a particular decision I had made: to end my series with the death of my main character.

Since then, every single time I open myself to reader questions, I get this one: Do you regret it?

* * *

A good ending, my writing professor told me in college, is both surprising but inevitable — and you have to earn it. So when I reached the climax of my third book, I tried on different endings in my mind. I wanted to make sure that the one I had planned since the first book was really the right choice. They all felt wrong, like I was avoiding something. They felt like cowardice.

On the day I wrote that scene, I told my husband, “I’m just going to try it and see how it feels.” I could always change it if it didn’t feel right. My heart raced the entire time. When I finished that afternoon, I was emotional — not because I had written her death, but because I knew it would take. Everything inside me was steady; this felt like the right ending for Tris, the character who had been living in my head for three books. This was the one. I knew it the way I knew I wanted to be a writer, the way I knew “Divergent” was ready for submission, my inner compass pointing resolutely north.

And yet for months after I sent in the draft, I was nervous. Not because I thought it didn’t work—I had set this ending up over the past two books, and to top it off, this installment, unlike the others, was written in two points of view. And not because I thought my readers would revolt — the death toll in the rest of the series was substantial, so surely they were prepared to lose characters at that point? But I worried I had been too obvious about it.

Hadn’t I?

At the end of both “Divergent” and “Insurgent,” Tris faced a kind of death — in one, she almost drowns; in the other, she’s nearly executed. In those books, there was still more for her to become, more for her to understand about what sacrifice meant and why it was powerful, one of the fundamental questions of her character from the beginning. But at the end of “Allegiant,” she was no longer becoming; she had become. And she gave her life for someone she loved despite his deep flaws. She saw what he needed, as her parents had once seen it for her. “Allegiant” therefore ended just as “Divergent” had, the books mirroring each other.

I was so sure everyone would see my handiwork and guess what was coming. It’s almost funny to me now, how wrong I was.

* * *

At the time of “Allegiant”‘s publication, the book set a record for number of preorders at its publishing house, HarperCollins — approaching half a million. It was wild, a rarity in YA before and since. That meant everyone would read the final installment at the same time. And as they finished, there was a collective burst of shock and grief over her death, with no one outside the readership to mitigate it. It created a storm in a teakettle. The reaction built momentum, and culminated in the threats and anger to which I later became desensitized.

The question I ask myself, ten years after “Divergent” first hit the shelves, is this: Is it the fault of my readers for not seeing my ending coming, or is it mine? Answering that question requires me to ask what my books conditioned them to expect. For me, raised on books like “Bridge to Terabithia,” “A Summer to Die,” “The Outsiders,” “Harry Potter” — and later, “Flowers for Algernon,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” — losses are a part of reading. I expect them, and have never particularly minded. A painful loss in a book feels like practice for the greater losses that await us all in life, no matter who we are. Or they give the losses we have already endured a voice, a moment of recognition.

But none of that answers the question of whether I did a good enough job at setting up my ending. Does it feel surprising, but inevitable? Does it feel earned? Those aren’t questions I can answer. The answers from others seem to be mixed, as they always are. But another thing I learned when studying writing is that the work must primarily speak for itself, and if people don’t understand what you’re up to, you shouldn’t leap to blame them for it. My writing education taught me to strip away defensiveness and look at what’s there, to be unafraid of what you’ll find. So when I look back at the books, yes, I do wince in places, because it’s my old work, and like any writer I can see now how many things I might have done better. I am sure that one day I will feel that way about the work I’m doing now, too.

But do I regret the way I ended my series? No. I don’t, and I never have.

As time has gone on, the tone of the messages I receive from readers — people are still discovering the series anew after ten years! — has changed. There are more fans of the ending than there used to be, and that’s nice for me, but I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the ones who are sad — sometimes profoundly so — and plead with me to write another installment.

This plea feels like its own expression of grief. What do we feel after a loss but a desperate need to go back to the way things were before? That’s impossible when we lose a loved one. But when we lose a beloved character, there is someone out there who can give us what we want, who could end our discomfort: the author. And the last few years have yielded results on that front in the form of continuations and reboots of stories — in books, movies and TV — we thought were long over.

But I’m not interested in providing an end to that discomfort. And it’s not because I want to shock people, or because I am — as one morning show host once put it — “ruthless.” It’s because this ending is an exploration of resilience, for the characters that remain as well as for the reader. It communicates that losses can be endured. That healing is possible. That pain is not forever. That discomfort is OK. This is something I wish I could go back in time and say to the parents who scolded me in the signing line for making their teenagers cry: It’s OK for your child to feel this. It’s OK to care about something, and then lose it. It’s OK that time doesn’t run backward.

I cling to these messages myself as I contend with my own assortment of discomforts. As I watch my parents age, as I battle anxiety and chronic pain, as I experience the losses of this pandemic along with everyone else, as I come to terms with the fact that the wonderful anomaly with which I began my career is unlikely to occur again. As I age, and friendships fade, and my options, once endless, begin to narrow. The things I am enduring — the things we are all enduring — may not always be OK, but it is OK to feel sad about them. Sometimes life feels that way.

I did end up writing the closest thing I’ll likely get to another installment: I explore the psychological aftermath of being a teenage “chosen one” in my most recent book (named, you guessed it, “Chosen Ones“) and the cost of bearing heavy burdens at a young age. I even destroyed Chicago for a second time — my apologies to my fellow Chicagoans.

But as for “Allegiant” — nothing has changed. My inner compass is still pointing north.

Mark Meadows pushed DOJ to investigate election conspiracies during final Trump days: report

According to a report from the New York Times, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent off a series of emails to the Justice Department during the waning days of Donald Trump’s administration, imploring the agency to investigate far-fetched claims of election tampering.

The Times came into possession of five emails dated during the last weeks of December and early January, where Meadows implored acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to intercede on the president’s behalf as he attempted to cling to power.

According to the Times’ Katie Benner, Meadow’s emails asked the DOJ “… to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

The report notes that Rosen rebuffed Meadows’ entreaties while noting, that Rosen, “… had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.”

As Benner explained, “the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.”

You can read more here.

Cooking Hawai’ian food isn’t just chef Sheldon Simeon’s passion — it’s what brings him comfort

When Hawai’ian chef Sheldon Simeon thinks about comfort, his mind immediately goes to coming home after a day at the beach. A bowl of saimin — a dish of noodles, broth and spam — warms him up after wading in the cool waters. Sometimes, it’s sugary malasada, known as Portueguese donuts, that comfort him, and other times, it’s a local soup of stew. Care, simplicity and warmth bring comfort to the chef’s life, but like many in his Hawaii’an community, it’s not only about the food.

“All of this [food] is all comfort to me, but the biggest comfort is when you’re sharing it surrounded by your family and your loved ones,” Simeon told me this spring.

Simeon became a household name as he competed on Season 10 of Bravo’s “Top Chef.” A fan favorite and competition finalist, Simeon has gone on to open award-winning restaurants LINEAGE and Tin Roof. His new cookbook, “Cook Real Hawai’i,” tells a myriad of stories about history, family and community through Hawai’ian food.

“We wanted to put the word ‘real’ in it to really capture people’s attention about the depth of our culture,” Simeon said. “We’re much more than pineapples on pizza or shredded pig in the cooked underground oven at a luau. We are this culture that is based in diversity.”

Born and raised in Hilo, Hawai’i, the third-generation Filipino-American uses “Cook Real Hawai’i” as a vivid opportunity to share the diversity and rich history of Hawai’ian cuisine. An immigrant-heavy tropical oasis, Filipino, Japanese and Portuguese culinary traditions heavily influence Hawai’ian culture and food, which is also deeply rooted in indigenous Hawai’ian ingredients and cooking practices.

Sheldon, who is of Filipino heritage, communicates this incredible diversity through recipes like spam musubi, garden poke, loco moco gravy rice and chicken liver mousse. These dishes — and so many others in the book — help tell the story of a state that’s often been showcased through aimless travelogues, stereotypical movies and the stories of non-Hawaiian tourists.

“What I hope that we did with this cookbook is that we’ll make people dive in deeper and see that we’re a lot more than just what you can experience at a resort,” Simeon said. “Talk to the workers and talk to the people from the community who are at these resorts, and you’ll find that it’s amazing and you can go into real depth and almost a grittiness of our history of Hawai’i through its food.”

Sheldon’s own history is filled with these familial and local stories. In elementary school, he helped his father — a welder by trade and his culinary hero — slaughter four pigs for a 700-person party. They also made pu pu platters of poke, smoked meats, potato and macaroni salad and Filipino desserts. Between helping his family cook at various events and washing down dishes and cooking pits, cooking Hawai’ian food isn’t just Simeon’s passion — it’s what brings him comfort.

“I was very fortunate to come from a family that puts food in the utmost highest respect,” Sheldon said. “We cherish anything surrounded by food, and I find joy in that and what I do today.”

Though Simeon’s career has landed him on TV screens and taken him across the globe, he still loves the feeling of waking up at 3:00 a.m. to cater a large event, as well as working long hours to ensure that every guest or patron is satisfied. A father and family man, the pandemic has disrupted Simeon’s usual way of providing comfort and joy to his community — but he’s eager for what’s next.

“The ultimate comfort is your ohana [family],” Simeon said. “We didn’t get to celebrate a lot of these moments together in this last year, but we look forward to the future.”

For Simeon, his slow-cooked, hearty Portuguese bean soup, which he described as “the comfort food of Hawai’i” is bringing him peace. It’s a dish that can’t be rushed, the base of which is stewing down the ham hocks and the broth. Simeon’s enjoyed many cultural iterations, including a favorite from a Japanese friend, and the different variations of the soup represent the diversity and cultural ingenuity of Hawai’i that Simeon loves so much.

Simeon’s iteration is rooted in his familial roots, and the Portuguese influence is also especially apparent. The key ingredient? Well, like many of the dishes in Simeon’s collection, the best things in life take time.

***

On the Big Island, this “everything but the kitchen sink” soup is one of our favorite rainy day comfort foods (and in Hilo, it rains a lot). The foundation of the dish is smoked Portuguese sausage flavored with warm spices like cinnamon and cloves. Dad always kept a few links stashed in our freezer just in case the weather called for it.

The running joke in Hawai’i is that the Portuguese locals love to do two things: talk and eat. And the only way to keep them quiet is to make a hearty soup with choke (lots of) fillings: beans, potatoes, macaroni, cabbage, etc.

Perfect for a leisurely afternoon cook, this is one of those soups where you throw everything in the pot and simmer until pau (finished). Usually the strong seasoning of homemade sausage is enough to flavor the broth, but if you’re using a milder store-bought variety like I often do, you can supplement the warm flavor with a little pumpkin pie spice.

– Sheldon Simeon

Recipe: Portuguese Bean Soup

Serves 8

2 pounds smoked ham hocks (2 to 3 hocks)
1 tablespoon neutral oil
3/4 pound Portuguese sausage, store-bought or homemade, sliced or crumbled
1 large sweet onion, medium-diced
1 large carrot, sliced
3 stalks celery, medium-diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed and peeled
1 large baking potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce
1 (14.5-ounce) can diced tomatoes
1 (15.5-ounce) can kidney beans, undrained
3/4 cup elbow macaroni
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal (or teaspoon Morton) kosher salt, plus more to taste
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1/2 medium head green cabbage, cored and chopped, or 1 bunch kale, trimmed and chopped

For serving

Tabasco sauce
Portuguese Sweet Rolls

In a large pot or Dutch oven, combine the ham hocks and 3 quarts water to cover the hocks. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer gently, covered but with the lid askew, until the hocks start to fall apart when poked with a spoon, 2 to 3 hours.

Remove the hocks from the pot and pour the broth into a separate container (the broth should have now reduced to about 2 quarts; add water if necessary to get to this amount). Once the hocks have cooled enough to handle, pick all the meat from the bones and set aside.

Wipe out the pot you used to simmer the ham hocks. Add the oil and heat over medium-high heat until shimmering-hot. Add the sausage and brown on all sides, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and stir in the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and translucent, about 12 minutes.

Add 2 quarts of the reserved broth, the potato, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, kidney beans (with liquid), macaroni, sugar, salt, pepper, and pumpkin pie spice and stir. Increase the heat and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and cook at a gentle simmer, covered, for 1 hour.

Stir in the cabbage and cook until crisp-tender, about 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the soup sit, covered, at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours before serving. Even better if you let it chill in the fridge overnight. Reheat until warmed through, and adjust the seasoning with more salt and black pepper as needed.

Serve with Tabasco and Portuguese sweet rolls.

This recipe has been reprinted with permission from “Cook Real Hawai’i” by Sheldon Simeon and Garrett Snyder, copyright © 2021. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Photography copyright: Kevin J. Miyazaki © 2021.

Like it as much as we do? Click here to purchase a copy of “Cook Real Hawai’i.”

Read more “Tastes of Comfort”:

“Today’s Special” brings global cuisine — and chefs of color — to the table

“We’ll all get there together”: Chef Edward Lee on restaurants’ resiliency and #MeToo in the kitchen

Over the past 18 months, Edward Lee’s day-to-day life has shifted dramatically. In early 2020, the chef, author and TV host was planning to open his fifth restaurant, Khora, in Cincinnati, while managing his other eateries in Louisville and Washington, D.C.

Then the pandemic hit, and the restaurant industry — and its workers — were immediately in crisis.

“There was a time that was very scary because everyone got fired or furloughed, and no one knew when the unemployment checks were coming in,” Lee said during a recent appearance on Salon Talks. “For some people, it was three weeks. For some people, it was over a month. People were panicking. And they were literally to the point where they said, ‘I don’t know where my next meal may come from. I’m good this weekend, but maybe not next week.'”

Lee stepped up and through his nonprofit organization, the LEE Initiative. He launched the Workers Relief Program, which now has 21 kitchens across the U.S. that have fed more than 1 million meals to out-of-work restaurant employees.

And while things may appear to be normalizing for restaurants as pandemic restrictions continue to lift (and they are, to a great extent), Lee said it’s going to take time to unwind the damage that 2020 did to the industry.

The chef spoke with Salon about the realities of owning a restaurant right now, what it was like launching multiple food-based charitable initiatives during a pandemic and how his past experiences on “Top Chef” prepared him to serve as a guest judge on the current season. To learn more, read or watch our conversation below.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Before we chat a little bit about some of the realities of owning a restaurant right now, I wanted to ask a couple of questions about “Top Chef” Season 18, on which you are an all-star judge. You were originally a contestant on the show in 2011. You had a great run. I was curious if you think having faced the fear of having to pack your knives and go will make you a more sympathetic judge?

Not necessarily. I think some of it is — when you go through the competition, you also realize what it takes to win. And I ultimately did not win. So I think it makes you sympathetic, but not necessarily. I wouldn’t give anyone a pass, because you sort of went through it yourself. I had to go home early, so you do, too, if you mess up a dish. It’s just the way it works.

Right. Without spoiling anything — because we’re partway through the season — is there anyone or maybe a couple of chefs who caught your eye early as potential front runners?

Well, because of timing and schedule, I only joined the show towards the end. I think I’m the last three of the episodes, so by then, it’s really on the cream of the crop. So I didn’t have to suffer through the early episodes where everyone’s cooking bad food. I chose the end, when I knew the food was going to be great.

That’s a smart choice. Transitioning a little bit to talking about the food industry off-screen, Bon Appetit published a lengthy interview [with you] in December that was titled, “I’m Afraid It’s Too Late To Save Restaurants.” In it, you detailed some of the helplessness that you and other owners were feeling. I think it was eye-opening for a lot of people who maybe aren’t super close to the industry. There was a line that I was hoping you could expand upon. You had said, “It’s the fluctuations that really hurt us. We rely on patterns and predictability for inventory, for staffing, for everything.” Could you say a little bit more about what it’s been like over the last year with regards to a lack of predictability?

Yeah. Food is perishable, right? So once you order something from your farmer or distributor, you have a finite amount of time in which to sell it. If you don’t, it goes into the garbage. And so if you think about that, it’s very tight. We could open up and have a packed house, or we could open up and have zero customers. Or we can have a weekend, which has happened, where we had bought all the food, prepped it, we’re waiting for the guests to come and then we had to shut down our restaurant with all of this food and we don’t get compensated for it, right? So those things are incredibly frustrating and it doesn’t make for a good restaurant.

So, I am sure people who are listening to this over the past year have had a situation where you went to a restaurant and they’re like, “Well, we’re out of this dish. We’re out of that dish. We don’t have this.” And you get frustrated. But know that that restaurant is trying to predict, right?

You can’t have a hundred portions of everything waiting in the kitchen because you’ll lose your business. So we’re kind of lowering our pars, in kitchen lingo, and then all of a sudden you get busy, right? And everyone starts ordering salmon and you’re like, “We’re out of the salmon. We’re out of the fried chicken.” And it’s frustrating because as restaurant people, that’s horrible for us. We don’t want to do that.

It’s a huge supply chain problem, as well. Because there are no customers, because restaurants were cutting back — the producers, the farmers, everyone went down to low inventory. The chicken producer doesn’t want to sit on a thousand pounds of chicken either, so now we’re back and open and we’re going, “OK, I need 40 pounds of chicken wings again.” And they’re going, “I don’t have it.”

Right.

You got to wait eight weeks for me to raise more chicken. These things are happening in all aspects. We saw it happen with toilet paper and with sanitizer and now it’s happening with food. So it’s a very interesting thing because we’re sort of at the tail-end of the pandemic shutdown, but in some ways we’re only at the beginning of the restaurant turmoil, which is going to happen over the next year or two.

On a related note, something I watched a lot of my friends who are chefs go through is anything they could try over the last year, they did. Like meal kits, or they started in-restaurant bodegas or to-go cocktails. They bought tents, and then suddenly the tents weren’t OK. I was curious, as a chef, if you could talk a little bit about having to constantly innovate. Was that exhausting?

Oh, it’s terribly exhausting. Like when you say innovate, it wasn’t innovation. It was just keeping your head above water, just afloat. It was trying to just keep yourself from drowning. So turning my fine dining restaurant into a barbecue shack for four weeks, I enjoyed it and it was fun, but to me it wasn’t innovating. It was something that I had to do, right? Which is different from something that I want to do. But I saw all of my chef friends, the entire industry, become so creative…just doing all these crazy things, just to float, just to survive.

Part of it was really fascinating. Some people really did some interesting things. And some of it was heartbreaking. To see chefs selling $8 cheeseburgers just so they can make payroll and pay their way — it’s heartbreaking. So it’s been a very, very exhausting year, and it’s more the psychological exhaustion, not necessarily the physical. And again, it’s like we’re not out of it. There’s still so much unpredictability right now. So it’s going to be a while before we get to some kind of “normal,” whatever that is.

And you’re in a unique position because your restaurant in Cincinnati opened in 2020. Is that correct?

Mm-hmm.

What was that process like? And how was it different than pre-pandemic restaurant openings?

It was awful. We opened in late October, just in time for the winter shutdown. We got a couple of emails from people like, “Why would you open a restaurant during a pandemic?” And I’m like, “We were supposed to open in April of 2020.” So it was all slated, we were on schedule.

People don’t know this. From concept to execution to actual opening of the doors, it takes about two years to get a restaurant off the ground. Also, this is part of a bigger hotel. So all of a sudden we had this whole thing, everything’s ready to go in April, May of 2020. So every month we’re just waiting, waiting, waiting.

Finally, it got to wintertime. And we’re like, “Literally, this brand new equipment that we got is going to turn to junk. [It] has never been used. It’s going to turn to junk. We have to throw it away and get new equipment, because you just can’t leave it like that.”

So we took a shot and we just opened, and we did okay. We actually had a really good opening and things were great, and then winter happened and there were more restrictions and shutdowns. You kind of lose steam. So then we reopened, I think in February, and now we’re trying to find that footing. It’s really hard because in any new restaurant, you have to find your loyal customers. You have to get your footing, you have to get your sea legs. And it’s just like, we just never got that.

We’re still in this weird holding pattern, but the food is great, the service is great. The people who are coming love it…So we’re just kind of floating through that way, but things are getting better. Literally, like every week it gets better. So we’re hopeful.

That’s fantastic. Well, I wanted to ask — I’ve written before for Salon about how Midwestern food tends to get — I think unfairly — a bad rap sometimes. I had seen it described that at Khora you’re making “modern pasta dishes and small plates with a Midwest sensibility.” What does Midwestern food mean to you?

So for me, from a very practical standpoint, all of the ancient grains and the flours that we use for the pasta is grown in Ohio. And it gets milled to order when we order it. So they’re super fresh. And a lot of them are grains that are indigenous to the United States.

The Midwest is a huge agricultural goldmine. People don’t realize how many farms there are in the Midwest. So I think there’s a practicality to the food. I didn’t grow up in the Midwest. I went to school in Michigan, so, I can’t say that I’m like a Midwesterner, but I do think there’s a lot of sensibility that is shared with Southern hospitality.

I think it’s a slightly more practical version of Southern hospitality. I’m not going to sit up drinking bourbon until four in the morning, but there is this warmth. There’s a friendliness, there a conviviality. The people in Cincinnati are so nice, but in a different way than Kentucky, too.

It’s not exactly the same. It’s not like “slap you on the back and hooting and hollering” hospitality. It’s a little bit more reserved. It’s a little bit more pulled back.

Obviously, like any restaurant I do, it’s going to be pushing the envelope a little bit more. I’m not here to do Midwestern food.

So when we say it’s a Midwestern sensibility, it’s like, yeah. We’re going to do pasta. And we’re going to push the envelope. It’s not Italian, but at the end of the day, it’s delicious. It’s comforting. It’s got a lot of butter in it.

We’re not going to go crazy and start putting foams on the menu. The color may be different. The sauce may be different. But you will still recognize it once you eat it — that it’s good comfort food and fills your belly and makes you feel good.

I’m excited to check it out. I wanted to talk some about your work through both the LEE Initiative and the Restaurant Workers Relief Program, specifically. Let’s start with the Workers Relief Program, through which I think you’ve served more than a million meals to service industry members to date. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re pushing like 1.2 or 1.3 million now.

That’s amazing. Could you tell me some about what it was like to get that initiative off the ground?

It was crazy because we literally started the day after the shutdown. I think it was like March 17th or something was the official shutdown date in Kentucky, and March 18th, we started.

It really started because between my three restaurants, I had all this food. We had a full walk-in. And I was like, “Well, I hate to throw this away.” And I had full staff, and I was like, “What are we going to do?” I said, “Let’s just cook up some meals and we’ll hand them out to the community.” And really it started, [by saying], “Let’s just hand them out to the neighbors in Old Louisville, the neighborhood.”

I put out a Facebook post or Instagram notice and the first day, like 50 people come. And by the second day, 300 cars were lined up around the block. It was insane — and it was all service industry [members]. It was all our friends and family. It wasn’t the homeless guy down the street. It was all restaurant people.

In the beginning, it wasn’t a restaurant relief program. It was just free food for anyone. And it was all restaurant people, and I realized this is going to be an issue. I didn’t know it was going to last a year. But I knew this was going to be longer than a few weeks.

There was a time that was very scary because everyone got fired or furloughed, and no one knew when the unemployment checks were coming in. For some people, it was three weeks. For some people, it was over a month.

People were panicking. And they were like literally to the point where they said, “I don’t know where my next meal may come from. I’m good this weekend, but maybe not next week. And if those unemployment checks don’t come in…” It was a huge panic. So what I’m most proud of, yes, we handed out the meals, and we turned our restaurant into a grocery store, too.

People literally did not have toilet paper, and we were handing out toilet paper. For us, we were handing out these things, but we were also giving people hope. We were giving people a sense of calm and normalcy in this crazy thing. People would come and stop and then cry for 15 minutes. And we would let them.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve said the words “We’re all going to get through this. Don’t worry.” Half the time not even believing it myself, but you give that out to your community. And I think that’s what I’m very proud of. And from there, Maker’s Mark was our sponsor, and we had so many people come on board. And then what I didn’t realize is, people start flooding money into our website for this program. So, we decided this is not just a Louisville problem, this is a nationwide problem.

So, we went from one kitchen to, I think, 21 kitchens in less than a month.

A couple more things about the LEE initiative that I wanted to highlight — could you talk some about the restaurant reboot relief program?

Yeah. So that part of it is the farms, and what I discovered when I started traveling was if anyone had it worse than restaurants, it’s the farmers, right? At least with the restaurants, we were able to turn off our lights, shut off the gas and electricity and go away. And farmers, you can’t do that. There’s no way to shut off a cow. Or to press pause on a carrot. They just continue to grow. You have to keep putting money into it. So, I saw this one farm and they had taken all their celery, beets and a bunch of things, and it was just sitting in a huge compost pile.

They were like, “We have no buyers. We have to just destroy it.” So there are a lot of farms that had this choice, which was either give your crops away for free or destroy it. It wasn’t a viable option, so we started purchasing all this surplus product from these small family farms.

Basically, it was a credit. Anything from like $15,000 to $25,000. We’d buy all that, they could use it up over time and then we would take the food and just donate it back to restaurants in the community that needed it and that were doing good work. So it was a win-win for everyone. I think we’ve given out over a million dollars in grants to small, independent farmers, sustainable family farms around the country.

That’s fantastic. In addition to the pandemic, I think 2020 was also a year where we saw the restaurant industry take another look at some of the gender disparity and sexism in some professional kitchens. I wasn’t sure if that was something that you all talk about in the Women Culinary and Spirits Program, which is your six-month program for women chefs?

I mean, yeah. Of course. This is the whole reason why that exists. Listen, we need more women in leadership roles in the food world. It’s just as simple as that. And there’s not enough.

Listen, when you have a boys club, as a man, it’s fun. But it’s not healthy for the industry. It’s not healthy for society. It just doesn’t work and we’ve seen that. And, happily, we’ve gotten — it’s 15 now, 10 chefs and five bar spirit mentees. #MeToo has been around for a couple of years now, right?

And a lot of restaurants have already corrected. And here’s the thing — the restaurant industry, to me, is still the best industry in the world. We do everything right. When we are not perfect and when there is a fault, we rise together, we call each other out and we try, and we do it. And we’re flexible. And we adjust and we adapt. Having said that, there was a case in Louisville . . .

There was . . .

Like five months ago or something, about a bar manager like raping someone . . . I’m like, who’s doing that now? Just forget about anything else, but like, after #MeToo, in a pandemic, who’s doing that now?

I remember when that thing hit the papers and Lindsay [Ofcacek, the LEE Initiative managing director and cofounder] and I just texted each other and was like, “This is why we have this program. This is why we need it.” Because even after all that, even after all the reckoning, there’s still some jack-off going out and doing this sh*t. And sorry for my language, but it frustrates me because to me it’s not about just that restaurant or that bar.

It brings the whole industry down. Because then they go, “Well, all men are scumbags.” And it’s not. Actually, 90% of the industry is really good people.

It’s these people who do this, and they need to be called out and we need to fix our stuff. And we are. And we’re making strides and we’re doing it. But in the meantime, it is still a problem.

My final question for you, Edward, is a two-parter. As we emerge from some COVID restrictions, what needs to happen for restaurants to be able to build back? And is there anything that customers can do to sort of help or assist in that effort?

We’re already seeing it, but we need some kind of consistency. We need to be able to control our destiny a little bit. We need to be able to have some predictability in what’s going to happen. And I think you’re seeing a little bit of it.

And for customers, I think, listen. Just be patient with us. We’re trying as best we can. There’s a labor shortage now. There’s going to be a food shortage, I guarantee. The prices for food are already going up, they’re going to skyrocket this summer, so menu prices are going to go up. Staffing is going to be an issue. That level of meticulous service that you used to get in 2019, may not be there for a while, and it’s not for lack of trying.

It’s just there are so many hurdles right now. But, listen, chefs and restaurateurs are a resilient group and we adapt. We’ll figure out a way out of this. If you think about it, most of the country opened up in, let’s say, March, April. Literally, hundreds of thousands of restaurants all tried to open in a three-week period across the country. It’s going to be pandemonium. There’s no way that that was going to be a smooth transition. And for my part, I’ve been dining out at a lot of restaurants to support. You’re seeing the struggles, you’re seeing it in their faces. And I would just say, be patient. Be patient. And we’ll get there. We’ll all get there together.

A guide to cheese and condiments for summer meals

I consider both cheese and condiments to be essential when it comes to elevating a summer spread. Whether I’m making a cheese plate or a more formal meal, I always try to make sure sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami notes are present in the cheeses and condiments I put out: together, they make for a party on the taste buds. Try these 5 cheese and condiment pairings for a future summer cheese board, sandwich, or hot-off-the-grill dish.

1. Taleggio & Grainy Mustard