When a creative city wakes up, what's for dinner?

[James Willer]

Two days ago, Detroit woke up and started eating lumber from it's vast resources of virgin forests. For lunch it started eating iron ore and it was a productive day of ship building and stove making. Dinner was light, mostly left-overs from breakfast and lunch. It squabbled briefly with it's neighbors to the south and went to bed dreaming of transportation and manifest destiny.

Yesterday morning, Detroit woke up and started eating immigrants and southerners willing to work for a living wage. The city was hungry and ate all day without any breaks between lunch and dinner (brunch had to be skipped due to some unfortunate global developments). When it laid down last night to finally get some sleep after an exhausting and trying day, it was confident today would be another day of good food and honest work.

Detroit woke up this morning famished. But there was nothing left to eat. A self realization dawned on the city this morning that in order to survive, it would have to get creative. A hard lesson was learned in the past two days about consuming more than could be replenished before the next morning. So the city tightened it's belt a little and went back to work without a full breakfast, just simply snacking on yesterday's leftovers.

It's eyes still a little bigger than it's shrinking stomach, it sets it's sights on brunch. In the back of it's mind though, the city knows that dinner time will come soon enough. So now the city has to ask itself, what's for dinner?

[Alicia Freye]

First, I would like to compliment the creativity of this scenario. In my opinion, as a student of hospitality and tourism, I feel that Detroit should capitalize on their rich cultural history and promote more tourism. The capitol from tourism filters throughout many levels of the community and glorifies the unique aspects of the areas involved. Extra tourism can never hurt. The best part about tourism is that it recycles itself. In the case of industries using natural resources, eventually these materials cease to exist and the companies must move on to other sources or be destroyed. Industry is voracious. Tourism brings a flow of business from many areas and focuses more on existing attractions and intangible, replaceable resources. This may not be the avenue that Detroit migrates to next, as far as their economy is concerned, but it would be beneficial to explore and expand.

[ECedo]

WOW! Very interesting narrative, very creative.

Hopefully dinner will be a potluck where entrepreneurs, creatives, small business owners and the like all bring a dish to pass while larger corporations continue to provide the meat and government and non-profits provide desert.

Two things are certain:
1.) The Big Three won't be providing all the food as in the past
2.) The line at the soup kitchen is full so hand-outs are no longer an option

[Andy McFarlane]

I think dinner is reheating what those immigrants and southerners ate yesterday along with everything else in the fridge and serving it up as the chef's special.

For too long we've been thinking that the world has passed us by. Nope. We've been out there in the post-industrial future, and it's high time we got to employing all those skills and systems that made Detroit what it was: learning, problem solving, designing, testing and working, working, working to build better than anyone the tools that everyone in the world can use to make their lives and this world better.

We didn't get become a leader of the industrial age by waiting for handouts, and we didn't get there by being cautious or thinking small.

As US taxpayers, we're all spending a pile of money that we don't have on the behalf of the banking industry. I'd hope that we in Michigan can scrape together whatever left we have for a massive investment in education, research and the startup of businesses that can thrive in these new times.