I Am Not Hamlet

Today while making a small purchase at Westborn Market (an ersatz farmer's market) I was standing behind a couple who had purchased a bag of MICHIGAN honeycrisp apples (a 10 year old breed of apple that I have yet to find a superior taste to). The bags were listed as being $2.99 a pound. The total for the bag (at over six pounds) was over $20. Now, admittedly $20 does sound like a lot for apples and I don't know this couple's financial situation, but even the cashier was agreeing with them. After they left I told the cashier that Americans are too used to cheap food. Our current agricultural system diverts the true cost of food from the consumer and puts it on the farmer, specifically the small, independent, family farmer--you know, T. J.'s dream of citizen yeomanry. I informed her that farmers have to make money too. Again, $20 for a bag of apples is probably stretching things for poor people, but the cheap shit is exactly that--shit. High calorie and ca...

I'm reading Bill McKibben's Deep Economy , a popularist approach to populism and its cultural accoutrement, localism. Anyway, here's McKibben's take on one way Detroit may be saved: Say you're a dreamer. Imagine the most ruined city in America. That would be Detroit, which has lost half its population in the last few decades. A million people have moved away; as much as a third of the city's 139 square miles consists of empty lots and dilapidated buildings, "an urban core giving way to an urban prairie," in the words of the New York Times . But slowly, some of that land is coming under cultivation: forty community gardens and microfarms, some covering entire city blocks, have sprung up in recent years. A farmer named Paul Weertz farms ten acres spread over seven lots, prducing hay, alfalfa, honey, eggs, goats' milk, even beef cattle. His tractor barn is an old garage. In 2000, a group of architects, urban planners, and local activists convened by t...