I'd been wrestling with thoughts about how art is an act of communication in which the audience participates, but in which the artist has responsibilities as well. If the audience largely doesn't understand the work, the artist has to consider the fault may lie with themselves. But at the same time the audience has to try to approach the work at least somewhat on the artist's terms.

Then I came across this from Cul-De-Sac, a generally bad newspaper comic, which sums up a lot of what I had been thinking and makes me wonder how bad I am myself.

(borrowed without permission)

When the fake olive oil scandal hit last year (and Google suggests that it's more an ongoing concern) the scam seemed a pretty obvious one. Over the last 10 years, thanks to the Food Network and perhaps one celebrity cook in particular, the demand for extra virgin olive oil has tripled in the US while production is still somewhat limited. Normally in that situation you would see very high costs brought on by high demand, but instead olive oil prices tend to be extremely reasonable on grocery store shelves. Most supermarkets even offer a store brand of the stuff. Given that most production is overseas and that extra virgin oil is generally sold for more than other grades, opportunities for fraud are plentiful and motives easily understood.

Which leads me to wonder about organics. Like olive oil, organic dairy foods have spiked in demand in the last 10 years, with nearly every grocery store offering milk, butter, eggs and sometimes yogurt from organic producers. I don't have sales figures but considering the considerable shelf space allowed for organics nowadays it's safe to assume sales are healthy, even with the higher prices that organics command. And as with extra virgin, the prices are higher but not outrageous, almost a regular/premium situation.

So with increased demand you should have increased supply, so where are the organic farms?

I tried to broach the subject during the #FoodD Twitter chat with little luck. I did receive one response from @ezweber (of @zweberfarms) who pointed me to the Organic Valley website, where one can enter a zip code and find nearby organic farmers that sell to OV. From here in the Ozarks, the nearest OV supply farm was in Kansas. After playing around with the site I found one farm in Missouri, and then a lot in Iowa. So it's possible that there are plenty of organic farms in the US, just none around me. That would be a good answer.

But the possibility - ok, probability - of shenanigans is pretty high, somewhere in the long production chain from teat to table. One of the recurring concerns during the #FoodD chat was transparency, and while this is a far cry from what transparency usually refers to (safe, clean food production with a minimum of cruelty) it's still a concern, if only to me.

Bang Bang

I like this version better than Nancy's. Raquel's a stiff hoofer in this, but it's a reminder of a time when a handful of performers were called upon frequently to provide fresh song-and-dance routines. It's surprising the choreography stayed reasonably varied for so many years of variety programs.

"It was easy."

It pains me to admit this, but Kurt Greenbaum was right.

Greenbaum, director of social media for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, posted an article detailing his efforts to protect readers of the paper's website from profanity. In short, after noting that one offender was posting from a school, Greenbaum called the school and informed them of the times and IP address of the naughty postings. In short order, the school employee was confronted by the school and quickly resigned.

In the week since, indignation has been howled and breasts beat. Anonymous chimed in. Comments in both the original article and the follow-up article about the aftermath cited the privacy policy of Stltoday.com, the Post-Dispatch's web presence, particularly this quote:

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.

What the comment writers miss, and what Greenbaum addresses clumsily in the followup, is that the privacy policy was never violated. The offending posts were made from a school and, just as if they were made from a private business or a government building, when one uses someone else's equipment and network connection to access the Internet, one's right to privacy goes out the window. The school posted the comments; Greenbaum called the school to correct the matter.

So Greenbaum had the authority to act as he did, but was it the right action? One comment--sadly I've lost the cite--complained that Greenbaum's was "a dick move". Again, I am forced to come to Greenbaum's defense. A dick move is spilling a drink on your date in order to get their clothes off, or faking a coughing fit during a competitor's presentation. It presumes prior knowledge that the action is unethical.

Greenbaum's was a bumpkin move. He allows after the fact that he might have "walked the idea around the newsroom" but what good would asking equally clueless people have done? For all the firing the Post-Dispatch has done over the last few years, I'm certain the legal team remains strong and robust. That would be a place to start, and could provide information necessary to defend your actions on legal grounds.

He further claims that an IP ban was considered but declined as extreme, as it would ban the entire school from the site. If such a ban is non-reversible, this is a fair argument, but the temp-ban is a tool well loved by moderators. A 30 minute ban would solve the problem with a minimum of inconvenience.

These are but two possible approaches to the problem, and apparently neither was considered. Why? Because as Greenbaum admits in the followup, calling the school was "easy". Just as it was easy for Amazon to delete purchased books from Kindle users' inventories, or for a cop to Tase a 10 year old, his problem was easily solved by contacting the school and violating the poster's admittedly erroneous expectation of privacy.

As is often the case, the easy solution won out over the responsibilities of ethics and authority.