craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

xxp why "artisan" and not "cheese maker"?

but you craft one pickle...

my business card says 'reclaimed dildo craftsman'

bespoke handmade dildos whittled with utmost care to fit your internal dimensions

Two fittings, guaranteed

I wld probalby buy a pickle from the guy who had been making pickles for 20 years over hte guy who had been making it for 6 months

THat's the problem, right. epople take time off and they read ablog about pickle making an three months later they open up the Picklery in red hook

read that as Pickleberry and thought "there's a concept the world is ready for!"

Nobody wants to eat your pickles that you psent three months learning how to make. thats probably a terrible pickle

The other problem is that thinking high quality ingreidents make for a good pickle. Okay your cukes are from a family owned farm near the finger lakes and your vinegar was distilled from all organic apples grown in connecticut. Your pickles still fucking suck you goddam asshole

Nobody wants to eat your raspberry dill coriander pickle. Go away

You say that and I want to agree w you but I had a temp roommate last year who made "peach lavender butter" which sounded mystifying (and worrisome) but turned out to be AMAAAAAZING and I wish she had been my roommate longer so I could benefit more. She was also young and super awesome and worked at an artisanal pickle store, incidentally.

ugh i spent $12 on a so-called artisan pickle that was SO OBVIOUSLY the work of a journeyman picklesmith, just dreadful, i just had to returned to the neighborhood cornichonerie and demanded my money back

Journeyman picklesmith is a delightful phrase

This brine. THis brine contains the salt of my father's sweat, and the salt of his father's sweat before him, and the salt of his father's sweat before him. WE have toiled long and hard and across generations to bring you this briny pickle. Eat it with respect

Give a man a pickle and he will eat that pickle. Teach a man how to throw a bunch of cucumbers into a barrel with some brine and vinegar and he will feed all of Brooklyn with artisanal pickles.

also <3 Journeyman Picklesmith. the central character in a ribald 18th C knockabout allegory.

http://www.cbc.ca/books/malcolm.jpg

sorry all this talk about brooklyn artisanal pickles reminds me of this: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2013/01/sell-out-part-one.html

pretty sure malcolm gladwell is a lurker here

i sense the pressure of his gaze

Can't believe i didn't read that story before. Amazing.

i do not know your words.

Ever so often I want to slip into that manner of speaking: "is good"

J - explain plz w yr own word things?

http://www.laparafe.fr/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/lesmots.jpg

that pickle thing was pretty funny. i read it. today.

I can't read it without hearing the voice of Gru which seems somehow appropriate.

that was my man herschel, sterl, cmon

hey elmo you've been talking about gender and fiber art a lot on this thread so it seems like the right place to mention this person's work to you http://erinmriley.com/section/19419.html

i have seen her work before! i really appreciate the tension in her work between the ephemeral nature of the snapshots she uses as source material and the actual process of tapestry weaving, which by its nature is very slow & rigidly procedural, accumulative

This sort of fits the thread, given the frequent conflation of precious consumerism with environmentalism:

http://observer.com/2013/04/the-lie-of-locavorism/

Maybe I don't hang out in the right circles to be pelted with so much "extreme locavorism" but that article seems so strident, not that I don't like a good rant because I do, it's just that, why does he have to beat it into the ground? I don't know who he's railing at. If it's just rich people whose nannies can pick up their CSA at the Navy Yard during business hours, then okay I guess but who takes them seriously anyway?

Yeah, outside a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn (and the circles of people who regularly eat in trendy restaurants) I don't think it's an issue that crosses people's minds that much. There's almost no visible "locavorism" in my neighborhood. Maybe it's visible at Whole Foods - I don't shop there. It's not like there's any real threat to the food system as we know it right now.

Community gardens aren't even my particular thing, but I could probably think of 3 benefits of them that aren't remotely addressed by that article. All the whole-life improvement stuff, understanding where food comes from, teaching kids about growing things, encouraging people to eat fresh veg & fruit by giving them a stake in them, just for starters.

I think there are important differences between community gardens and the kinds of urban farms he's mainly talking about.

But yeah, I think there's probably benefit to every city having some urban farming, it's just not the kind of thing that we can or want to scale to account for a significant part of our food supply (except maybe in cities like Detroit that have huge amounts of unused land).

I've thought about that before but I'm fairly certain no soil in Detroit is clean enough to grow food in--trucking in the topsoil and/or cleaning up all that land is prohibitively expensive and complicated.

Also yes, block gardens etc are different from the farms he's talking about, but he's ONLY TALKING ABOUT one arm of the local food movement. It feels like he just chose the one he could "debunk" and ignored the others.

hmm good point in re Detroit

i too think that fresh fruit and vegetables are better when they have steak in them

was it the new yorker that had that article a long time ago about how much less energy people in cities use? per person or whatever. that article was ahead of its time. maybe its still online.

when i lived in philly i ate a LOT of new jersey produce in the summer. there was so much from jersey. great stuff too. you could get normal jersey vegetables or fancy vegetables. they had it all.

okay, i should really read that article. i'll read it now...

new jersey has lots of great farms. but they are great actual farms. it is a state with lots of farmland.

its the garden state, iirc.

i'm already confused by that article cuz he says people in nyc want more gardens and then he talks about gas mileage from roscoe new york.

eh i can't read the whole thing. when he starts blasting CSAs - you don't even know what vegetables you will get you better really like vegetables! - what a dummy.

even the whole gas mileage semi truck/freight train travel thing is dumb. as if a train from california stops in front of every grocery store and unloads its produce and saves precious energy. that train unloads and a million trucks load up with produce and then navigate endless miles of city traffic to get the friggin' carrots to grocery stores. dummy.

reading scott's posts in a dr. steve brule voice

lol me too