The directive written on the chalkboard that listed Café Gutenberg’s menu items read: “Eat Local!“ By all accounts, that’s what many Richmonders were doing yesterday at the second annual Shockoe Chef Showdown at the 17th Street Farmers’ Market. Some of the area’s best culinary minds competed for the best meat, vegetarian and dessert dishes, and then showed their talents during an “Iron Chef”-type competition where they were given a secret ingredient from one of the local vendors and had to come up with a dish.

Tomatoes were disappearing by the bite, bag and box yesterday as tens of thousands of people took advantage of a beautiful afternoon at the area’s two annual tomato festivals. At the 31st annual Hanover Tomato Festival, traffic backed up for miles either way on Pole Green Road in Hanover County as people waited to snake into the park for a taste of the county’s most famous crop. At a big tent in the middle, the tomatoes were going fast at $7 to $10 a bag or $35 a box.

It’s time to end this long, drawn-out debate over the best site for a new baseball stadium in Richmond. The Shockoe Bottom location represents the only real momentum we have toward a ballpark. Highwoods Proper ties, which has proposed the Shockoe Center development, appears to be the big-league player in the batter’s box. Mayor Dwight C. Jones is correct in saying there is no consensus on the ballpark. But if we wait to build consensus, we’ll never build a ballpark. People are entrenched in their points of view.

Now that we’re shoveling dirt over the slavery museum in Fredericksburg, let’s bury the notion of a baseball stadium near the Richmond site of a slave jail known as The Devil’s Half-Acre. The apparent demise of the U.S. Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg—which is more than $24,000 in ar rears in real estate taxes and whose founder and chairman, L. Douglas Wilder, has gone incommunicado—offers an opportunity to make things right.

Legislation designed to get a new baseball stadium or a renovated stadium in Richmond has cleared its first legislative hurdle. House Bill 1803, proposed by Del. G. Manoli Loupassi, R-Richmond, at the city’s request, would designate 2.5 percent of the sales-tax collections derived from the stadium—and the development it spawns—toward paying the bonds used to finance the construction.