Reprinted with permission from the July issue of the Ester Republic.

Barring the proverbial”act of God,” many people seem to agree that Matanuska Maid’s days are numbered — the valiant, last-minute coup detat by Governor Palin notwithstanding. It is not for a lack of vision; in fact you might say that too much vision is what has steered the dairy down this path. Mat Maid has been operating as if it bore a mandate to offer all manner of dairy products to all Alaskans, all the time, including some unexpected ones like Florida orange juice and a pro-biotic yogurt called “Glacier Yo” intended for export to Pacific Rim countries. There is plenty of blame to go around, and the folks who won’t buy local milk because they think it costs too much deserve their share of it, but nevertheless you simply can’t have an industrial dairy without first having a dairy industry.

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Reprinted with permission from the June issue of the Ester Republic.

‘Outpost Agriculture’ is a new column I’m authoring in the Ester Republic, an independent publication of the Independent Republic of Ester, AK. The column is conceived with a mission to explore all things food: the science, culture and politics of its production and consumption. It takes its name from a 1967 article by geographer Karl Francis, who said “Agriculture in Alaska is of a peculiar kind that has heretofore escaped valid and effective conceptualization.” As far as I can tell, things haven’t changed much.

Inspiration for this first installment, of what I hope becomes a Republic tradition that matches the’Missionary Position’ came at the Fred Meyer’s produce department. There are a number of things that are bound to annoy me on a trip to Fred Meyer’s: shoppers who hang out in the middle of aisles, for instance. But at the top of the list is when people mistreat produce. And the most severe form of this capital offense, bar none, is when they peel back the husks on corn-on-the-cob.

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Apparently I’m not the only one struck by this. Leonard Pitts Jr., a commentator for the Miami Herald, ponders the future of our past and the new trend in unlikely mating of technology with common household items. Its a more optimistic way of saying something I was trying to get at.

He’s right to be optimistic. Not every step moves you forward and what you learn from mistakes often slingshots you towards greater enlightenment. But beneath the gloss of his wit and optimism he touches on a greater problem. “The future is always sold to us bright and shiny by big corporations making bigger promises about how new technology will render us complete. There’s always a sense of ‘Buy this and all your worries will be over.’ You’ll be smarter, thinner, wealthier, healthier and have more sex. Somehow it never works out that way, but we keep lining up anyhow..”

Our misstep isn’t that we feel the need to put a television in a refrigerator, its that we line up to buy them. With every new invention comes a marketing slogan that claims this new thing will make us whole. Every time it fails to. Over and over, ad infinitum ad nauseum. Our lack of identity and self confidence keeps us from breaking the cycle; it keeps them making power toilet brushes.

If we keep buying, they’ll keep selling. I believe in personal responsibility for choice and our choices. Free will is somewhat like an ouroboros because how do we make choices if not by personal experience and values, if those experiences and values have been set by some external will? Most of what people know and believe comes from 3 places: family, religion and the market. Most people won’t immediately admit the third. Its not until recently that smoking cigarrettes carried a stigma. For decades tobacco companies convinced us that smoking was sophisticated and sexy. What is sexy about foul smell and yellow teeth? The only thing our nation spends more on than food today is dieting — we’re supposed to eat more but be thinner. That sounds like a lucritive partnership between industries to me!

Perhaps it is not impossible for consumerism to drive real innovation, though it may seem that way. Perhaps it is not the corporations’ fault for doing what it takes to make money. Perhaps its our fault for spending so much money on items we think will give us a soul because we apparently have none. Perhaps if we didn’t count our self worth in dollars. Is it their fault for lying or ours for believing?

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