craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

aero do you not eat any BBQ sauce on any of your vegetarian foods?

ppl wanna hate on my now and laters and then let syrup get on their sausage

savages, savages all

aero do you not eat any BBQ sauce on any of your vegetarian foods?

lol nice try, I do eastern NC style (vinegar, not tomato-based) BBQ

this about you being from california, isnt it. you just dont understand maple syrup. its okay!

I had maple bacon ice cream once, even. That actually wasn't that good. I don't think there's ultimately a way to incorporate bits of bacon into a dessert without it just seeming forced.

maple walnut is maybe top 5 of all time

man in re: ashtrays upthread, if 100% of your ashtrays aren't stolen or thrift-stored u r 100% chump imo

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, November 15, 2011 4:27 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

otm

this about you being from california, isnt it. you just dont understand maple syrup. its okay!

actually I think it probably is Cali-based. I dig maple syrup but I don't have ~feelings~ for it like I do for, you know, mole poblano....which is a sweet/savory sauce smh

I think I detect a bit of thread drift here.

^^^
quality artisinal thread policing

More like disorientation, such as when emerging from the bathroom and finding the decor has been changed on you.

o damn we are talking about maple syrup from heritage ranked trees collected by purebred nuns on steamed-birch sleds with hand-hammered spigots and spider-silk sap-pipes

...plus Happy Hour is over, the menu has changed, the lighting is different, and all the waitstaff has donned bowties.

hand-crafted bow-ties made from the virgin pubes of indigenous African pubescents

I see. Well then, carry on.

here I will dedrift

man iatee I've been avoiding this thread specifically so as not to beef with you but like...in the 1600s, one could not really have foreseen the impact of widespread literacy. but it's really a great thing that literacy took hold; little of what we hold dear would be possible if literacy hadn't caught on.

it's appropriate you bring up the 1600s cause ultimately this has roots in this weirdo historical rural-fetishism - the local farmer w/ a small plot of land is some noble creature from another age and we need to support him. etc. etc.

but the effect of, you'll forgive me, thinking differently about things - even if the vehicle that gets people toward different thinking is ineffective/a panacea/less-than-ideal - is longer term than I think you have in mind, and of considerable value viewed through that lens.

right but I don't actually see very many people ~thinking differently~ about the big picture 'how our society works' macro-level efficiencies, instead they're bogged down by this or that micro-level thing - "what was the path of one particular object I bought."

shopping local now may not change things on any appreciable scale over the next one hundred or two hundred years, and no-one questions that other measures are needed to correct/offset/change the effects of human behavior on the environment/earth/humans-at-large.

right and I'm more concerned about...the next 20 years

again:

a. most of the greenhouse gas emissions come from production stages, and small scale farms are just as likely to have *worse* emissions during these stages because they don't have a lot of the efficiencies that a large scale operation has. 10 farmers have to buy 10 trucks vs. 1 farmer w/ a really, really big truck. (etc.)

b. emissions from you doing your shopping w/ a car are generally gonna exceed the emissions from the distribution chain. it seems counterintuitive that the 'last mile' that you drove to the store is worse than the 500 miles your coffee traveled to get here, but the coffee traveled w/ many other things as part of a v. efficient network.

c. I don't think buying local is a 'bad thing' it's just not a great thing to spend that much time talking about / rewarding yourself for. for certain things buying local will make economic sense in its own time. I don't buy the zs argument that we need to start early - if small farms are the answer, they have (in the big picture) very small start-up costs and don't require much resources to be allocated towards them. whereas adapting our urban landscape to the 21st century would prob require, idk, the entire gdp at this point. so yeah, it's a better thing to get people talking about.

very many resources to be*

if you can't eat dessert of your dinner plate by now, you should just give up

off*

local food still a bit of a drift from the original thread topic tbh but that's ok

I've had awesome candied bacon ice cream.

So on the pineapple tip: realized I never had non-canned pineapple until I was probably a teen. Canned pineapple is a pretty responsible use of excess in-season pineapple, right?

right but I don't actually see very many people ~thinking differently~ about the big picture 'how our society works' macro-level efficiencies, instead they're bogged down by this or that micro-level thing - "what was the path of one particular object I bought."

this is p disingenuous imo--"the path of this one particular object i bought" is *precisely a version of the macro story*

by micro I meant w/r/t the "one particular object" - looking at individual acts of consumption instead of bigger less-visible processes

but an understanding of the material systemically-produced nature of those acts of consumption is the grounding of the holographic understanding of the bigger processes! asking "how did i get this fruit" is an activation of consciousness, the first step on the road to understanding its role the complex system that got you the fruit, and the plastic bag you carried it home in, and the car you drove to get it, and the underpaid worker who picked it, and the chemicals sprayed on it by the company that grew it, and the subsidies the company gets, and the lobbyists they employ to make sure they get the subsidies, and the investment firms that act as intermediaries for the multinationals, and the people who no longer grow pineapples because they were crowded out by the multinationals, and the whole fucking fruit basket of bullshit!

Wow thinking about a time when oranges were available only once a year provides much sustainable, clean-burning fuel for my juice-rage (Juice is stupid! Nobody has any business drinking the squeezins of half a dozen oranges at one meal!)

i agree with you but six oranges make enough juice for like three people

You should read up on how "not from concentrate" is actually a horrible scam and orange juice from concentrate is actually a less adulterated, better product in most cases. It was enlightening for me. Storing orange juice concentrate is also an excellent use of excess oranges, and more space efficient than the fruit.

That's kind of the main pitfall of the search for more "authentic" products or ones of a higher quality: half the time it's marketing and you end up worse off due to ignorance of the process.

look, I'm cool w/ increasing overall consumer consciousness, I just think "local = always better" is encouraging a naive and simplistic take on a subject that requires a lot of nuance. if that entry-level consumer consciousness seemed like it led to more nuanced views that'd be one thing, but even people who spend a lot of time on this can't seem to concede that *sometimes a bigger farm is better for the world* and that *not every food mile was created equally*.

there's also a weird protectionist aspect to this whole thing + everything that comes w/ that

xp to hoos

Xp probably the moral of the thread.

I just think "local = always better" is encouraging a naive and simplistic take

I'm not sure anyone here has advocated that local= always better, so perhaps you've been shadow boxing. If so, you wouldn't be the first person to respond to what they expected to hear rather than what was said. Lord knows I've done it before myself and I've seen it in operation hundreds, no, thousands of times.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13117

^ craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

whoa

I'm not sure where privilege works into that list.

I'm responding to them responding to me saying "local is not always better"

I'm not sure where privilege works into that list.

― Aimless, Wednesday, November 16, 2011 7:03 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

the disposable income (& leisure time) to purchase (the material to build) a 3-D printer?

those printers are getting increasingly affordable and easier to build! it's a matter of it being a hobbyist thing with few commercial parties involved at this point

I invented a 3d printer once, I called it a 'plant seed'

Did it grow into a prosthetic hand?

can you print food with a 3-d printer

most of the food you eat...probably

*buys a 3-d printer*

Did it grow into a prosthetic hand?

no I got a model of Capitol hill built out of purple and yellow Legos; was pretty bummed

those printers are getting increasingly affordable and easier to build! it's a matter of it being a hobbyist thing with few commercial parties involved at this point

― mh, Wednesday, November 16, 2011 7:12 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm just sayin

That's what always kills me about people who are like "my mac can't be opened up and the hardware tinkered with blah blah." We have so many hobbyist and experimental fields that are available now that still have low barriers to entry, and the things you can do easily have grown exponentially.

We also end up with the issue that sometimes the market catches up faster than you can get your project off the ground. My college roommate was tinkering for a couple years with making his own LCD projector. At the time, ones with decent quality were pretty expensive and you could build one with an array of high intensity LEDs and the panel from a LCD monitor and, say, the lens from an old overhead projector.

Now you can buy a used (or even new) LCD projector for less than you'd spend in materials cost.

this thread isn't long enough!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/21/111121fa_fact_kramer

today's headline: rich people discover that some wild plants MAY be edible.

rich people fail to realize that the greenhouse gasses saved by their "foraging" is offset by the fact that they fart a lot

People go morel mushroom hunting around here. They're tricky to find. I've also had wild strawberries, raspberries, handful of other things.

Stay away from the wild ditchweed, though