You Can’t Beat It for the Price

This week, you get twice as much — and it’s still free

Anything you get for free is abused, I heard a wise man say. His proofs were pretty compelling, and he had the authoritative tone and deep voice that wise men use to subjugate listeners. It was a law, he said, of no less a science than economics.

If Bay Weekly were the work of economists, you’d be paying a big price to read these words.

Economists we’re not, and no doubt we’re the poorer for it. But you’re the richer.

(Thank our advertisers — who pay the bill for every word you read — by spending your money with them.)

This week, you’re doubly rich.

First, you’ll find another strong, enterprising story leading this week’s lineup. Journalism student Sara Newman’s long-awaited story Waste Not, Want Not follows Simone Gorrindo’s Inside the Yellow Box in explaining another of those mysteries hidden in plain sight.

Waste Not tells the back-story of abundance, explaining what supermarkets do with their leftovers: all the apples, bread, fish, meat and zucchini we don’t buy. We’ve saved this story for the week before Thanksgiving, when we’re all planning our menus and doing our shopping for the year’s biggest feast — which makes this one of the biggest grocery-shopping weeks of the year.

By serendipity, you’ll be reading Waste Not during the week dedicated by Gov. Martin O’Malley to Maryland Hunger Awareness Week. Officially, the proclamation celebrates one year of the Partnership to End Childhood Hunger by increasing the number who benefit from federal nutrition programs, including Food Stamps (now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and the School Breakfast and the At-Risk Afterschool Supper programs. (Learn more at www.eatsmartmaryland.org.)

We’re taking Hunger Awareness Week broadly as a fine time to tell you how most supermarkets work hand in hand with food banks to fight hunger by sharing the wealth of abundance.

This week’s Bay Weekly makes you richer still by dropping into your hands our annual holiday supplement, Season’s Bounty.

Only a Grinch couldn’t love Your Indispensable Guide to Holidays on the Bay. That Grinch is Bay Weekly staff writer Diana Beechener, who laments that Season’s Bounty “ate my whole month of October.” Fortunately for her, it rained much of October 2009.

But even when the days were sweet and we were outside, chasing the pleasures of Indian summer, Beechener was working the phones and pounding the keys, seeking the pleasures of another season — all 36,000 words of them — this Indispensable Guide brings you.

Yes, the winter holidays start this weekend, and thanks to Beechener and your Season’s Bounty, you’ll be ready for them.

Thanks also to the advertisers who pay for these pages; the sales team of Lisa Edler Knoll, Amy Kliegman and Karis King who work hard bringing advertisers to our pages; to Betsy Kehne and J. Alex Knoll for making the ads and designing the pages; to the proofreaders who volunteer their eyes to bring you error-free pages; and to the delivery drivers who haul this doubly heavy load.

Except for Beechener, all of us who’ve had our hands and eyes on Season’s Bounty are bubbling with early holiday cheer and eager to mark the pages of our own copies with ways we look forward to celebrating the season.

So thanks to all who bring us this rich season. Enjoy, give and share the Season’s Bounty. But don’t give your copy away; it’s good as gold. And it’s yours free.

from the Editor

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