Commentary
Ocean City Today Dec. 10, 2021
Page 43
Complex report: it’s complicated Former city councilman and perennial council critic Vince Gisriel asked some pertinent questions this week about the sports complex study commissioned by Ocean City and conducted through the Maryland Stadium Authority. Essentially, he asked why the report’s public release didn’t occur until last month when the study was completed in January 2020, and why was he told periodically that it wasn’t available? Those are excellent questions given that the firm that conducted the study, Crossroads Consulting Services, wrote in a letter to the stadium authority that “it is understood that this document may be subject to public information laws and, as such, can be made available to the public upon request.” To be clear, “may” is the operative word here and means maybe the report is subject to the state’s public information act and maybe it isn’t. Even so, the council’s decision to sit on these findings until now is excessive, although it could be related to the report’s implication that a sports complex anywhere in Worcester County is no slam dunk. Crossroads lists this area’s advantages and disadvantages as compared to other locations and venues and calls on the council and stadium authority to draw their own conclusions. It also repeatedly makes the point that timing is of the essence, and the longer it takes to get a complex fully established, the more likely it will face strong regional competition. Nevermind the difference between the pre- and post-pandemic economies, Crossroads suggests that a major challenge could come from the Mid Atlantic Youth Sportsplex that Berlin’s John Barrett created just up the road in Pittsville. It’s already marketing Ocean City’s amenities, and “is contemplating the expansion of its current facilities to create a 25field complex ...” The report adds, “The growing supply of similar outdoor sports facilities will need to be closely monitored to avoid market saturation.” Obviously, the council has had quite a bit to think about, hence the delay in releasing the information. Yes, they should have done it sooner, but our guess is it couldn’t happen until the council could agree on what it wanted or needed to say.
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PUBLIC EYE
Pot pie, or not pie?
What people eat, or whatever diet they choose to follow is their business, as far as I’m concerned. If someone believes that it’s good for them and the planet to eat a bowl of sugarfree pine cones, topped with a sprinkling of moss scraped off the side of a Mongolian outhouse, or believes that roadkill ‘possum is best if lightly sauteed with just a hint of rosemary, I’m fine with that. But don’t confuse me with all this faux food that’s making its way onto our grocery store shelves in packages that say it’s one thing when it isn’t that at all. By And in that regard, I give Stewart you “Plant-Based Chicken Pot Dobson Pie” in a grocery store near you. Let me be clear: there is no such thing as “plant-based chicken.” Nor, as it happens, is there any such thing as “PlantBased Beef Pot Pie,” which I also saw on the frozen food shelf in a grocery store near me. The only thing I wanted when I went into this store was a regular, flaky-crust-on-top, pop-it-in-the-microwave, brown-in-oven-ifdesired chicken pot pie. But no. All I could find was two stacks of “PlantBased Chicken Pot Pies” (and faux beef pot pies) lying in wait for some unsuspecting shopper like me to scoop one up, take it home, heat it up and say, “Hey, where’s the *&!@)_$# chicken?” And then rummage through the trash for the container it came in only to discover after
the fact that I had been hosed by the “chicken not pie” industry. Look, I get it that the vegan set, with whom I have no quarrel, want things that taste like food they used to eat, but won’t eat now for one reason or another. But let’s straighten out this naming business. I know, for instance, that the dairy industry continues to protest the label “Almond Milk” on the grounds that milk is a dairy product and nuts aren’t properly equipped for delivering that sort of thing. They’re wrong, of course, as there is coconut milk, not to mention milkweed, which these days could refer to milk drawn from cows that wandered into the wrong field in Colorado or some other marijuana-legal state and refused to leave because they were especially contented. Regardless, there’s no getting around the subterfuge perpetrated on society by the marketers who insist that plant-based chicken is a thing, although if it is, it’s probably the same sort of chicken that laid the non-eggs that are contained in “Egg-Free Eggnog.” That’s on the shelves too these days, although it is clearly a contradiction in terms. To put it more bluntly, if it ain’t got eggs, it can’t be egg nog. It’s just nog. Or they could call it Not-Nog, or Egg-less Nog, but not “Eggfree Eggnog.” All I can say is that I support truth in labeling so I know what I’m getting. In the meantime, I’m urging Congress to write some kind of law that makes clear that a poultry plant is not what chickens are made of.
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