Tradition
Recently (the past few years, really) I've been increasingly interested in traditional things. Woodworking with hand tools, folk music of various types, acoustic instruments, classical french cooking techniques, hobby farming, untreated 100% cotton/wool clothing, full-grain leather goods, and I've become more and more disgusted with disposable items, mass production, and centralized distribution in general.
I'm sickened by the way commercial farming is conducted, whether they are growing crops, or raising chickens everything is done on a huge scale, in a centralized location, with more and more highly specialized species. There used to be hundreds of different breeds of chicken. Some were good egg-layers, some had particularly flavorful meat, some were more resistant to hot or cold temperatures, some where ornamental, and some were good general purpose animals. All of them roamed around and were effective pest control for the garden since they ate bugs and weeds. Additionally, since they moved around, their waste was dispersed over fairly large areas and replenished nitrogen levels in soil used for gardening. Now, there is a single breed of chicken that is used for practically all meat production in the country. It's been engineered to grow to "table size" at a very young age, and can live its whole life in a 1 foot cube eating food that has absolutely nothing to do with bugs or weeds. Additionally, the huge numbers of these birds living in such concentrated areas has led to the contamination of ground water supplies in the areas surrounding these "farms." Today, many of those old breeds of chicken are literally facing extinction. Chickens. Going extinct. Also, take a look at an egg carton sometime. I've started seeing ones with "chickens fed with vegetarian feed!" written on them. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard, SINCE CHICKENS ARE PREDATORS. You know why they say that though? The other eggs aren't laid by chickens that eat bugs, they are laid by chickens that are fed the ground up feathers, bones, and blood of other chickens. So your options are eggs laid by chickens fed an inhumane, unnatural diet, or chickens forced into cannibalism. Have fun with that.
Popular music is almost all written by one guy living in Sweden (look up Martin Karl Sandberg aka Max Martin), and basically every product on the market is made to be thrown away within five years or less. Even furniture! When was the last time you saw a dovetail joint? Or any kind of non-mechanical fastener, come to think of it. Clothes now wear out before they go out of style, and it's not like we've gotten harder on our clothes in the last 100 years! And the thing is, that all this continuous production of worthless stuff is depleting the planet's limited supply of certain raw materials. Like iron ore, or good cold-weather spruce, or pernambuco wood (an endangered tree that is used to make violin and other bows). Good luck making all that cheap, stamped out, thin-gauge, ugly silverware in 60 years when you can't make steel anymore!
Everything on the market is a cheap piece of crap, and the people who knew how to actually make things are gone or on their way out. In some industries, you can't even find the tools to reproduce a quality example of something because the 200 year old company that was making them went out of business in the 90's and nobody noticed. The other day, I ran across a $40 mandolin. The problem is, $40 wouldn't pay for the hardware on a mandolin, much less the wood, much less the labor, much less the cost of shipping it to this country on a boat from whatever Middle-Eastern or Asian country it came from. But the truly frightening thing about a $40 mandolin, is that whatever company made it wasn't planning on making $40, they were planning on making thousands or millions of dollars. Otherwise, what would be the point of even doing it? Can you imagine how many of these things you'd have to make and sell in order to make enough money to make it worth doing? Especially since there must be SOME cost in producing them!?
Gustav Stickley (1858-1942) said "As we grow older and begin to stand on our own feet and to cherish our own standards of life and of work and therefore of art, we show an unmistakable tendency to get away from shams and to demand the real thing." Thank God he didn't live to see the mess we've gotten ourselves into now.
I'm sickened by the way commercial farming is conducted, whether they are growing crops, or raising chickens everything is done on a huge scale, in a centralized location, with more and more highly specialized species. There used to be hundreds of different breeds of chicken. Some were good egg-layers, some had particularly flavorful meat, some were more resistant to hot or cold temperatures, some where ornamental, and some were good general purpose animals. All of them roamed around and were effective pest control for the garden since they ate bugs and weeds. Additionally, since they moved around, their waste was dispersed over fairly large areas and replenished nitrogen levels in soil used for gardening. Now, there is a single breed of chicken that is used for practically all meat production in the country. It's been engineered to grow to "table size" at a very young age, and can live its whole life in a 1 foot cube eating food that has absolutely nothing to do with bugs or weeds. Additionally, the huge numbers of these birds living in such concentrated areas has led to the contamination of ground water supplies in the areas surrounding these "farms." Today, many of those old breeds of chicken are literally facing extinction. Chickens. Going extinct. Also, take a look at an egg carton sometime. I've started seeing ones with "chickens fed with vegetarian feed!" written on them. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard, SINCE CHICKENS ARE PREDATORS. You know why they say that though? The other eggs aren't laid by chickens that eat bugs, they are laid by chickens that are fed the ground up feathers, bones, and blood of other chickens. So your options are eggs laid by chickens fed an inhumane, unnatural diet, or chickens forced into cannibalism. Have fun with that.
Popular music is almost all written by one guy living in Sweden (look up Martin Karl Sandberg aka Max Martin), and basically every product on the market is made to be thrown away within five years or less. Even furniture! When was the last time you saw a dovetail joint? Or any kind of non-mechanical fastener, come to think of it. Clothes now wear out before they go out of style, and it's not like we've gotten harder on our clothes in the last 100 years! And the thing is, that all this continuous production of worthless stuff is depleting the planet's limited supply of certain raw materials. Like iron ore, or good cold-weather spruce, or pernambuco wood (an endangered tree that is used to make violin and other bows). Good luck making all that cheap, stamped out, thin-gauge, ugly silverware in 60 years when you can't make steel anymore!
Everything on the market is a cheap piece of crap, and the people who knew how to actually make things are gone or on their way out. In some industries, you can't even find the tools to reproduce a quality example of something because the 200 year old company that was making them went out of business in the 90's and nobody noticed. The other day, I ran across a $40 mandolin. The problem is, $40 wouldn't pay for the hardware on a mandolin, much less the wood, much less the labor, much less the cost of shipping it to this country on a boat from whatever Middle-Eastern or Asian country it came from. But the truly frightening thing about a $40 mandolin, is that whatever company made it wasn't planning on making $40, they were planning on making thousands or millions of dollars. Otherwise, what would be the point of even doing it? Can you imagine how many of these things you'd have to make and sell in order to make enough money to make it worth doing? Especially since there must be SOME cost in producing them!?
Gustav Stickley (1858-1942) said "As we grow older and begin to stand on our own feet and to cherish our own standards of life and of work and therefore of art, we show an unmistakable tendency to get away from shams and to demand the real thing." Thank God he didn't live to see the mess we've gotten ourselves into now.