First of all, Minnesota is beautiful. The above is a jankily thrown together panoramic picture showing the view from the farm where our friends Tim and Tiffany were married. We spent Friday and Saturday in Minneapolis, drove with our friends Eric and Clare to Grand Meadow (pop. 963) on saturday, and drove home via Minnesota Route 16 (one of the most scenic drives I've experienced) through "Bluff Country" (I didn't know there was a bluff country in Minnesota). Anyways all this to say that on Friday we happened to pass by the Mall of America, which ominously imposes on the Minneapolis landscape. As I gazed in wonder and fear at this multiplex, a quote that Wendell Berry used in the preface to his essay "Life is a Miracle" popped into my mind:"We are not getting something for nothing,
We are getting nothing for everything"
- Lionel Basney
We are getting nothing for everything"
- Lionel Basney
In contrast to the gorgeous Minnesota countryside and the appealing old buildings and cathedrals in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Mall of America offers nothing aesthetically and serves only as a monument to materialism. All the while we bipassed the Mall and headed to the adjacent IKEA (equally as ugly, and even more so a monument to superficial materialism). Wallowing in my own hypocrisy, and since it was a gloomy day, I started thinking of ways in which we are getting nothing for everything. Immediately I started thinking about the whole spinach scare (the next day I would thoughtlessly order a spinach omlet at a restaurant, to which our waitress replied: "where have you been?"), and how a Maryland woman who dies from eating contaminated spinach grown in California is the most recent example of getting nothing for everything. And while sulking over the woes of industrial farming practices, I remembered a Wendell Berry essay The Pleasure of Eating that really changed the way I view eating. So I thought I'd share it with you (read here) and if you don't read the whole thing at least skim through his seven points on how to eat responsibly. So there you have the progression of my thinking whilst in Minnesota. It really was a great trip.
One way to act on this is to get your food directly from a local farmer via a CSA (community supported agriculture program). I found CSAs in Pinckney, E. Lansing (this is our new neighbor...TOTALLY ORGANIC!), LA, and Fort Wayne at www.localharvest.org
Alright time to get off my soap box, see y'all Cali's in a few weeks (Can't Wait!!). See the Mitten Staters soon too!! Love --- wesley
One way to act on this is to get your food directly from a local farmer via a CSA (community supported agriculture program). I found CSAs in Pinckney, E. Lansing (this is our new neighbor...TOTALLY ORGANIC!), LA, and Fort Wayne at www.localharvest.org
Alright time to get off my soap box, see y'all Cali's in a few weeks (Can't Wait!!). See the Mitten Staters soon too!! Love --- wesley
2 comments:
you should've seen his face get more and more disgusted as we walked through ikea. yet we left saying, "we should get blinds at the ikea in michigan once we measure our windows." oh my. anyway, it was a great trip to take pre-arrival of "fat tuesday gaines" (which is what we're thinking of calling the baby--any takers?) a lovely way to spend a birthday--on a farm with friends, sheep, and my favorite husband.
Great post, Wesley. It seems that shopping (consumerism) is arguably the last form of public activity. Town centers, suburbs, streets, even airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, churches, the Internet, and so on, are all shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The Voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal -if only-modes by which we experience the city. (Harvard Project on the City).
Look at how shopping malls and BIG box stores have placed such a blemish on the American landscape and offend the consumer with unnecessary amounts of unnecessary products. Yikes!
I'm afraid the beginning of the 21st Century will be remembered as the point where public life could no longer be understood without shopping.
And thanks for the Wendell Berry antidote.
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