One of the foundational principles of our movement is service to others. It's very important that the men and women who are there for their first retreat are served all weekend by those of us who have done it before. It's Christianity in action. For example, we never hire cooks, we do the cooking ourselves.
When your group goes up to use the place, you can either bring your own cooks, or hire cooks employed by the organization that owns the facility If you hire the cooks, they can use the new kitchen. If you bring your own, you have to use the old one.
Why?
Well, the new kitchen has been inspected and certified by state regulators. The cooking staff for hire has been trained by the state to cook properly to maintain the certification. If we amateur slobs* went up there and cooked food, we might unwittingly make changes to the condition of the kitchen which a spot inspection would find, losing the place's state accreditation. Instead, we use the old kitchen.
So in order to genuflect to the state like the worthless vassals we are, we maintain two kitchens. The new, state-certified one is just for show and the old, crummy one is the one we still use.
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| King George III. It's like he never left. |
4 comments:
You are just covering up the dramatic difference in the body count between patrons of the old and new kitchens.
Potemkin Village Kitchens? http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/dict.aspx?word=Potemkin+village
This is at best a state issue. I say "at best" because it's how this facility has decided to interpret the CA state laws.
At any rate, the state is responsible for food health safety. And you choose to live in California. You can live in a state such as New Mexico were there is no food safely inspection. It's a libertarian dreamscape where the market regulates food safety. And except for those first few who get food poisoning, works like a charm.
No matter how many tens of thousands of pages there are in the Federal Register or how many hundreds of thousands of sub-committee rulings detailing the broader regulations in the Register, this latest round of regulations are the ones that will keep us from eating tainted meat / getting shafted by the megacorporations / turning hoses and dogs on blacks.
The most ironic thing of all is that, in the example, even if this latest round of inspection regulations were the ones that kept us alive, they can't possibly work because we're not using the state-inspected kitchen.
Maybe the regulations aren't keeping us from tainted meat. Maybe the state is like some gigantic, sightless grub, always-growing, gorging itself on money and freedom.
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