Chew Chew choose not to return

The wife and I went to the Green Mountain Chew Chew Fest this afternoon, an annual event where local restaurants and vendors set up and you pay for tokens for the privilege of overpaying for tiny sample portions of their foods. We've gone for about 10 years, missing one year. I always think it's a bad deal, but she loves it and we have found a couple restaurants by seeing them there that we frequent. That's the best part of it really.

Every year I try to stick to not eating anything I've tried before - or at least never tried from that particular restaurant.


The "deal": $5 gets you 9 brass tokens that you spend at the booths. Prices at the booths range from 2 to 4 tokens. You get sample sizes of dishes. Usually a few bites worth. You walk around with a map of the vendors located under 3 tents and figure out what looks worthy of taste testing and where to get it. Request the item, dump your tokens into bowl or jar or whatever and eat.

This year, the person who sponsors the event decided to charge a $2 per adult admission fee. Yep... a fee to get into a place where you for the last 20+ years got in free to spend money. We were angry, but that was only the tip of the iceberg, since 3 vendor spots listed were empty and the selection pretty much sucked for what was there.

Normally I complain about the event - being expensive for the end results [though we have discovered restaurants through being there] - but this year even my wife was annoyed and even angered. I was annoyed to the point that I wrote an email to the organizer detailing my complaints. I don't expect any resolution from it - the changes appear to be purely financially driven, so who am I to defy capitalism??

On that note, we watched SiCKO tonight. Michael Moore does a killer job at entertaining us and angering us at the same time. This country is out of control with it's capitalism and it's brought to light in me the realization - over the last few years it's been brewing in me - that the core of our evils in this country are capitalism and the driving force of much of that capitalism is christianity. I'll leave more discussion on that topic for another time, but the documentary is about the sick nature of our health care system when compared to other countries. Much like the Chew Chew Fest, if you don't have much money, it's just not the place for you. don't get hungry, don't get sick, sit down and shut up... "let the entrepreneurs do their thing - their American duties - and make a few greenbacks on your hard work".

We now have no intention of returning to the Chew Chew Fest. I have been burned enough, and now the burn is shared. Good job guys... you took what was once likely a really cool thing and turned it into the shit we now expect of anyone who tried to turn a buck on anything that might have any social value.