I hadn't found much to relate to until she started talking about food. Midway through the article, she writes: "And then there is gardening--or at least, joining a community-supported agriculture collective; in New York City, the first step, perhaps, to becoming landed gentry." And that got me thinking about how, indeed, vast swaths of young, hip people these days are tuning into the pleasures of food grown either at home or close to it.

This, of course, is where that article intersects with this blog. Why, after centuries of rural flight to the cities, where a supposedly better life lies, are people rubbernecking at the countryside? Why are those friends of mine who, a few years ago could barely make an omelet, doing things like making butter and vinegar and preserves, when they can so easily buy them? Why, for that matter, am I?

Maybe we're getting sick of reports, like the totally gruesome factory farm map that Food & Water Watch recently released, which shows the concentration of hog, dairy, chicken and cattle farms in the various states across the country, and how badly they pollute. How hard is it to get excited about Paul Willis' Thornton, Iowa hog farm when you realize that he's tending 450 pigs in a state that hosts over thirteen million of their kin, not to mention the pernicious, smelly baggage they unload everywhere they go? 

Maybe we're tired that the big farms and factories which churn out most of our food have taken so many cost-cutting corners that the stuff they now hawk as food barely resembles food anymore? Green tomatoes gassed until they blush, culled apricots thrown at the trash pile if they don't meet size and symmetry requirements, lettuce suspended in nitrogen and polyethelene like a Botoxed Beverly Hills matron just the other side of middle-aged. 

Maybe spending years chained to a desk means that, all of a sudden, the pantry or garden doesn't look so bad. This, obviously, is an opinion that only people who have never been chained to a pantry or garden are likely to have, but hey, there are a lot of us who fit that criterion these days.

Everything old is new again. Even....Victorians?