Who benefits? It\u2019s the classic detective\u2019s starting point, right? But it\u2019s been on my mind lately thanks not to a body in the billiards room but to my friend N., whom I hooked up with in New York after a gap of, oh, eight years. N.\u2019s worked for years in the music industry, but has also, of late, gotten really into food\u2014specifically, Mexican food. Multiple trips south have turned him into a terrific cook (or so I hear, at least) and he\u2019s tossing around various ideas (classes; culinary tours) that might maybe someday blossom into an alternate career.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve known each other since high school and reconnecting with him was one of the highlights of the trip. But he also turned out to be one of the best sounding boards I\u2019ve found so far for the mess of ideas and half-baked theses bouncing around my brain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho benefits?\u201d he wondered, after I told him about the island, the hotel, and the wheat , the beer, and the booze.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good question. Assuming a good year, the principals, obviously: Brian Vandewalle, Leah Caplan, Brian Ellison. The brewery. The distillery. And, of course, the farmers. But beyond this handful of invested few?<\/p>\n
Indirect beneficiaries include the grain processor, the malter, and the trucker\u2014who I haven\u2019t met but apparently got so excited about the project that he, too, dug into his farming roots. Now, in addition to trucking grain off the island, he grows backup wheat over on the mainland. (Note to self: meet trucker.)\u00a0Farther out in the world, beer distributors and liquor salespeople benefit. And I suppose you could make the case that, yes, craft beer drinkers and artisanal spirits enthusiasts benefit as well\u2014though, frankly, that case would be kinda puffy.<\/p>\n
But what about back on the island? Is there a benefit to the community itself? People tell me that 2007 was a banner year for the Washington Island Ferry. Record numbers of tourists made the extra step onto the Robert Noble<\/em> and the Arni J. Richter<\/em>. And at a basic rising-tide level of logic, all the other businesses on the island\u2014the restaurants, the motels, the bars \u2013 benefit from the increased traffic. Can this traffic be tied directly to the success of Island Wheat? No. In fact, last year the Door County tourism board launched a PR initiative\u2014funded by a hotly contested countywide room tax\u2014designed to raise the profile of the peninsula and (reluctantly) the island statewide. (At a meeting last year a spokesperson for the commission boasted that he wanted Door County to become as big as the Wisconsin Dells. I swear I saw several islanders visibly blanch.) But given the amount of press generated by the hotel, the beer, and, most recently, the booze, it\u2019s not a preposterous suggestion.<\/p>\n Since I\u2019ve been up here I\u2019ve fallen into (or, I confess, overheard) lots of conversations between tourists, summer people, and islanders. By all available evidence the growth of the wheat business\u2014and the island-branded beer and liquor\u2014is a point of no little pride. But you can\u2019t eat pride, and the island still suffers a profound shortage of jobs outside the tourist industry. Most of the island\u2019s produce still comes wrapped in plastic, straight off the Sysco truck\u2014and the money that comes out of islanders’ pockets to pay for it goes straight back to the mainland. I\u2019ve also heard, anecdotally, that the dedication of 900 acres of farmland to the cultivation of wheat may have inadvertently triggered an island-wide shortage of hay.<\/p>\n Who benefits? It\u2019s not just a good question\u2014it\u2019s the<\/em> question.<\/p>\n So, thanks a bunch, N. Now I have a lot more work to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who benefits? It\u2019s the classic detective\u2019s starting point, right? But it\u2019s been on my mind lately thanks not to a body in the billiards room but to my friend N., whom I hooked up with in New York after a gap of, oh, eight years. N.\u2019s worked for years in the music industry, but has … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deaths-door-spirits","category-washington-island"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}