My Virtual Reading Room

the tyranny of folding clothes... LOL! I never thought about that.

Thanks for the links, whose very headlines give me the keystone to something I've been thinking about.

In the United States my family and I buy good food, real food, lots of produce, not so much fellow-animal. We apply skilled labor to it. By and large we eat as deliciously and healthily as people who lead ordinary lives can, in the United States.

The produce in the Yorkshire makes it clear how pallid the US produce I don't grow myself is, even though I buy for quality. And though I buy pasture-raised eggs and humanely raised chicken, eggs and chickens in Yorkshire are more delicious. And the goodness of butcher's meat in Yorkshire mops the floor with meat from the Good Butcher in Arvada, Colorado. (Comparison of fish is unfair: Colorado is very landlocked, in the Rocky Mountains, and Great Britain is a maritime nation.)

Paris: even in the limited circumstances of a week in a "vacation home," same. Mallorca, again in a "vacation home," same.

And the streets and windows are clean in Harrogate and Paris and Mallorca, and one sees service workers of all sorts of age operating with the calm gravitas of people who do this for a living, and it's a good or decent life.

Intrinsics are being valued. The services produced by labor are appreciated, and labor treated with dignity. Food and drink aren't just conveyers of calories and chemicals, they are sensual experiences.

In the US dominant cultures are analytically reducing fleshly and experiential goods and services to tokens of cost or acquisition. Even the health-analytics of food tend to be reduced to rather arcane notions of health that may not only be represented by, but consist of blood analysis numbers and such.

Where tokens are valued above substance, the present is sacrificed to accumulate tokens with no intrinsic value. Insofar as those aren't simply counted and valued as a desiccated number, they are accumulated toward imagined futures. And little investment is done to enrich the actual futures that are coming. One thinks of carbon abatement, maintenance/renewal/upgrade/reinvention of material and immaterial infrastructures, stiffed because investing in them would require relinquishing those husks, those value-tokens-- which would still remain in the economy as income to human beings for supplying labor.