From Word To Word

The August edition of Dinner and a Doc is upcoming on the 8th, and we will be watching Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist.  Most people will probably be familiar with Demme’s feature films, which include The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he has also directed several very good documentaries, like Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.  The Agronomist explores the life of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station through several of the country’s regime’s, and who was eventually assassinated.

For further information, see the official trailer, an interview with Demme about the film, and a recording of Dominique speaking about his Haitian nationalism.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I took my two boys to The Green Legacy Tree Nursery yesterday morning.  I ran across this operation when I was looking for seed-grown Red Mulberry trees a month or so ago, and I thought that the boys might enjoy seeing how trees are grown, so we borrowed a car and went to volunteer for the morning.  We enjoyed our time very much.  The boys mostly chased the resident dog and cat or played with the daughter of one of the nursery’s employees, while I helped transplant seedlings that will be kept in the greenhouses for another winter.

On our way into the nursery, however, and on our way out, I was startled to see a number of signs that a neighbour had posted along the edge of the nursery’s property in plain view from the laneway.  The signs aggressively abused the nursery, describing it as a waste of tax dollars and discouraging people from volunteering there.  The signs were professionally made and had clearly cost a significant amount of time and energy and money, and they were a disturbing reminder of how much remains to be done in changing the way that people understand the significance of naturalization and reforestation in our communities.

I found the signs doubly disturbing in light of a similar situation that I had encountered the previous week while the boys and I were vacationing on Manitoulin Island.  The beach at Providence Bay, where we spent much of our time and where I have gone frequently since I was a child, has become increasingly vegetated over the years, whether because the boardwalk has kept walkers off the dunes, or because lower water levels have allowed better conditions for the plants, or because warmer weather has allowed a longer growing season.  Though I find this naturalized dune habitat very beautiful, many of the local residents see it as destroying their biggest draw for tourists, who provide most of the town’s income.  They would like to dredge the beach to remove the encroaching plant material, but several threatened species now grow there, so dredging is no longer permitted, and the residents feel that the future of their town is being threatened.

I am not unsympathetic to the feelings of those in Providence Bay who are trying to protect their livelihood.  They have already seen their shipping and fishing industries disappear over the years, and they may very well be right in thinking that a second stage dune ecosystem will not attract tourists nearly as much as a pristine sand beach.  The situation, however, need not be as insoluble as they suppose.  Though it may no longer be possible to advertise their beach as a vast stretch of unmarked sand, it has now become possible to market it as a unique ecological habitat, to offer guided tours of the dunes and its flora, to make effective use of the already existing interpretive centre, and to build a local eco-tourism industry.  This approach would allow them to qualify for various government grants and would position them well for the future.  It would require, however, a substantial shift in the attitudes and the expectations of the local residents, both in respect to what the relationship between the economics and the ecology of tourism should be and also in respect to what it means for a beach to be attractive.

In the case of The Green Legacy’s neighbours, I am not sure whether their concerns are as valid as those of the Providence Bay community, but I think that the situation is likely structurally similar.  I suspect that the conflict has arisen, as it usually does, because environmental idealism has contravened long-standing assumptions about how tax dollars should be spent, communities should be built, businesses should be run, and priorities should be determined.  I also suspect that the solutions would be similar to those of Providence Bay as well, involving a better integration of economic and ecological needs in order to produce a relationship between the environment and the community that sustains both.

The shift in attitude that is required, I think, and often in both parties, is away from the assumption that economy and ecology are necessarily opposed.  While I would suggest that a balance between the two will often come at the expense of economic efficiency, simply because of the degree to which these kinds of concerns have come to dominate ecological ones, ecological change will only be sustained if the people who are driving it can sustain their own livelihoods as well.  It is difficult to convince people to work for environmental change when this seems to mean the loss of  their jobs and of their communities.  It is much easier when there seems to be a possibility for new jobs and more vital communities.

An ecologically aware economy will almost certainly be less effecient than an ecollogically absuive one, but this does not imply that we need to abandon either ecological or economic sustainability.  It means only that we need to understand the goals of an economy to be other than mere effeciency, to be the creation of both healthy environments and healthy communities.

Late this past Saturday night, or, more probably, early this past Sunday morning, some people walked by my house.  They were more than likely intoxicated, walking home from one of the many bars and pubs that are within a few blocks of me, and they decided that it might be entertaining, for whatever reason, to rip out the stakes and strings that I had placed as supports for the bean plants that my kids had planted earlier in the spring.

The stakes and string were not very expensive, of course, nor very difficult to erect.  I actually found the stakes for free, and it took me all of a few minutes to hammer them into the ground and run string between them.  It will take me even less time and no money at all to return them to their places.  In this sense, pulling a few stakes out of the ground is a mostly harmless bit of vandalism.  It hurt no one, damaged little, cost nothing.

There is another sense, however, in which I find the pulling of my stakes to be a far more serious matter.  It is indicative of a certain disregard, of a certain unconcern, of a certain closedness to the other, that is the profoundest enemy of community and neighbourhood and home.  It is not a selfishness precisely, because it has as little true concern for the self as it has for the other.  It is a closedness, both to the self and the other, a closedness to the self as it becomes itself only in relation to the other, a closedness to the self in community.

This closedness saddens me.  It moves me to sorrow, not because of a few stakes and a bit of string, not because of a few extra minutes or a few extra dollars, but because it opposes entirely the possibility of the neighbourly and the communal and the familial, because it holds the seeds of inhumanity.

This past Saturday was a busy one for our family.  We spent the morning at the Speed River Cleanup, an annual event where volunteers pull a year’s worth of garbage out of our local river.  We spent the afternoon with some friends who came to visit, the kids playing in the back yard while the parents were chatting over soup preparation.  We spent the evening watching The Boys of Baraka for this month’s Dinner and a Doc and eating the soup we had made that afternoon.

As I was going to sleep that night, I found myself reflecting on these neighbourhood activities and on how deeply they contrasted with those of the urban Baltimore neighbourhoods that were portrayed in Boys of Baraka, where life is dominated by poverty, crime, addiction, and violence.  Now, I recognize the complex of factors, both past and present, that have produced and perpetuated these urban neighbourhoods, and I recognize also that the question of how to renew these communities is difficult in the extreme, politically and economically and logistically.  It involves providing adequate learning, employment, and health to a massive number of people living in densely populated and poverty stricken areas.  It involves overcoming a long established culture of hopelessness, addiction, and violence.  It involves addressing the effects of the slavery, exploitation, racism, and classism that has been perpetrated over several hundred years.  It involves, in other words, alleviating the by-products of a capitalism, democracy, protestantism, industrialism, and nationalism gone horribly wrong.

Traditional approaches to this problem are often of the institutional and programmatic sort: a restructuring of the grossly inequitable education funding formula, a publicly funded and easily accessible health system, a massive rebuilding of infrastructure, widereaching retraining initiatives, consistent support of local businesses, a landscaping program to replace concrete with parks and gardens, free and accessible addiction counselling and rehabilitation centers, free and accessible family conflict counselling.  Though many of these initiatives would be beneficial, I think, and though some of them are absolutely necessary for a viable future in urban neighbourhoods, all of them would require a staggering level of financial, political, and logistical commitment.

The very limited attempts that have been already made to revitalize urban neighbourhoods, such as those in New York, have shown some success, but only at tremendous cost to governments and to charitable organizations.  The resources simply do not exist to implement these kinds of initiatives on the scale that is required.  It may possible to send twenty boys to a school in Kenya or to make other limited interventions, and these things are valuable in their way, but it is not possible, not through traditional institutional and programmatical means at least, to fund or support these kinds of programs on a scale that have any realistic hope of changing urban communities.

The real problem, therefore, is not how to change the culture of urban neighbourhoods, or of any other neighbourhood for that matter.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods without the resources to make large scale institutional interventions, even if everyone could agree on what these interventions should be.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods through other means, and I confess that I am not sure what these means would be.

I can only suggest, from the perspective of someone obviously unqualified to make any suggestion at all, that we need to imagine a renewal of community that proceeds, not from institution or from government, even if these things are involved to a certain extent, but from human relation.  What if people formed sharing and bartering cooperatives to help alleviate their low incomes?  What if they provided homeschooling or afterschool learning groups to help supplement the poorly funded schools?  What if they developed community gardens on balconies and on rooftops to help provide food?  What if they organized community programs to get people safely out of their homes and away from their televisions?

I know that none of this would be easy, and I know that none of this would be without risk, but it seems to me that these are the only forms of renewal that have a hope, because they proceed from the community itself and from the relationships within it rather than from the kinds of programs that governments do not have the resources to run.  Yet, the question remains, who will begin these relational approaches to neighbourhood renewal within communities that are so oppressed by poverty and violence and fear?  Who will continue them through the many difficult years that will be required to renew a whole culture and a whole community?

This is where I truly have no answers?  Perhaps it is too much to expect from these broken neighbourhoods themselves.  Perhaps it can only be expected from those of us who have been fortunate enough to experience what a neighbourhood and a community and a family can be.  Perhaps it requires you or I or both of us to go and begin to live in these neighbourhoods as best we can in order to support and encourage those who are already living there as best they can.  If so, I am at fault.  Though I am moved to pity, I am not willing to stop by the side of this road.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard makes this intriguing statement: “Each one of us should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows.”

He says this as he is discussing the image of the road, as he tries to articulate how the road appears to the one who imagines, to the one who daydreams, to the one who remembers the past like a dream.  He argues that those who dream the road, dream it as something dynamic and active, something that carries them along with its own pace and its own cadence. and he cites George Sand and Jean Wahl and Henry David Thoreau as being among those who have dreamed of the road in this way.

I am arrested by this image of the road.  For whatever reason, perhaps because the automobile distances me from it, or perhaps because I am conditioned to overlook it as mere infrastructure, the road has remained almost exclusively an object for me.  It has played an intellectual role in the sense of being the space beyond my door that nevertheless leads to my door, the space of encounter and of invitation, the space of the other, but it has never existed for me in itself, as image, as dynamic and active participant in the journey and in the encounter.

Bachelard’s attention to the road in this respect returns me to Michel de Certeau’s discussion of walking in The Practise of Everyday Life, where he argues that walking a space, discovering its by-ways and shortcuts, in fact recreates that space for us according to its own contours, in opposition to the spacial structures that are imposed on us.  Though de Certeau’s understanding of walking is much more explicitly political, and though it does not itself raise the idea of the road as image, it seems to me that his roads are perhaps open to the kinds of imagining that Bachelard is describing.  Perhaps the recreation of space through walking is not exclusively a function of following the informal paths but a function of following all of its roads and paths with an attention to where they are taking us, with a concern for what they allow us to imagine.

This kind of space, these kinds of roads, would indeed be worth speaking about, would indeed be worth mapping, as Bachelard describes, but I am not sure how to begin such a project.  I could write a detailed catalogue of the places that I walk, something in the mode of Georges Perec, but I am not sure that this would do justice to the imagistic element that Bachelard is describing.  I could also write a moment by moment account of my walking, producing something closer to James Joyce’s Ullysses, but this does not seem quite right either. Of course, it is possible that there is no form that is adequate to this speaking, at least not in every case, so I will offer only the following few lines as the barest gesture to speaking about the roads that draw me along:

The city’s roads turn ever inward,
Draw us through their intimate places,
Give us dreams of an unremembered history.

I sold our car today.

My wife and I have talked about doing this for several years now, but it was an ideal that was always deferred by her commute.  It was only recently, when she was finally transferred to Guelph, that living without a car became a real possibility.  It was also recently, at precisely the same moment, to be honest, that living without a car became a real anxiety.  What had seemed a beautiful ideal at some ambiguous point in the future had suddenly become disconcertingly possible.

We recognized, of course, that this kind of anxiety is part of making any substantial change, particularly when it is a change that involves something so socially and culturally significant as the car.  We recognized also, though not without a fair amount of reflection, that selling our car would not actually result in any problems very difficult for us to overcome.  We are, therefore, as of several hours ago, officially without a car.  We are, to use the language of Ivan Illich that I have already quoted elsewhere, officially moving at the speed of the bicycle, or rather, since I much prefer to walk than to pedal, at the speed of our own two feet.

I am simultaneously elated and terrified.

Tom Abel and I took a break from I and Thou this week. We have not abandoned Buber altogether, just deferred him a little, until a friend of Tom’s can join us and contribute his more experienced voice to the discussion.

In Buber’s place, we read Hugh Kenner’s The Elsewhere Community, which was originally delivered as the 1997 CBC Massey Lectures. We chose it for the very simple reason that Tom found copies for two dollars each in the discount rack at a local mega-bookstore that I will leave nameless. Neither of us had ever heard of Kenner before, but the title and the summary on the back seemed interesting, so we read it.

It is a meandering, anecdotal book, circling around its argument rather than stating it outright, providing examples rather than definitions. Its thesis, far from explicit, is something like, “Going elsewhere, experiencing other places and people, becomes the basis of a kind of community between those who have had similar experiences.” Most of the book is not concerned with elsewhere communities generally, however, but with a literary elsewhere community, one that he describes mostly through his own experience of the community that he found among the modernist poets, particularly Ezra Pound. In this way, the book is also autobiographical to a degree, relating the history of Kenner’s introduction into the elsewhere community that defined his own work.

Kenner’s idea of the elsewhere community is an interesting one, and there is much in it that I recognize from my own attempts to foster community. For example, my first instinct in meeting someone for the first time is to discover the books and the films that we might have in common, and my first instinct to develop these relationships further is to suggest a book or a film that we might approach together. It is not necessary that this text be the subject of any sustained study or reflection, only that we begin to create the shared experience of these texts as a place through which our community might develop. In this sense, these texts function as an elsewhere, as Kenner himself argues, that can serve as the basis for community.

I do have several reservations about Kenner’s idea, however. The most significant of them is that he fails to distinguish between two different experiences that I would regard as being fundamentally different. On the one hand, he describes that places and the books and the people that one experiences and though which one forms community with others. On the other, he describes the people who are met themselves, the people with whom a community might be formed. Whereas I would mark these as very different things, even recognizing how they might interrelate, Kenner never really distinguishes between them. He speaks of going to Rome to see the ruins that Cicero saw in much the same way as he speaks of going to meet Ezra Pound, as though these two journeys were essentially the same, despite the fact that the latter resulted in a long lasting and significant relationship with Pound. I do not think that Kenner would actually understand these two kinds of journey to be the same, but he never marks them as being different, never suggests that they might be functioning in very different ways.

I find this especially interesting because Pound’s instruction to Kenner, the instruction that Kenner says is “the single most pregnant sentence” that he has ever heard uttered, does recognize this difference that I have been describing. “You have an ob-li-ga-tion,” Pound says to Kenner, “to visit the great men of your own time.” This is no injunction to merely read what these people have written or to go and see what they have seen. It is a demand that these people be met face to face, that they be encountered in themselves.

It was this demand that I found more compelling than Kenner’s own wandering narrative, and I found myself posing the question of who I would meet if I had the opportunity. Which writers and thinkers would be among the great for me? With which would I most like to form some sort of community?

After eliminating those who were already dead, I was surprised at how easily I arrived at a short list. I would meet David Cayley, because he is the one who introduced me to Ivan Illich and Rene Girard, and he stands as a sort of link for me to these deceased authors. I would meet Annie Dillard, because she writes the things that should be written. I would meet Walter Wangerin Jr., because he is the only living representative of a certain tradition of fantastical and allegorical writing that has influenced me tremendously over the years. I would meet Jean-Luc Marion, because he has had so profound an influence on my understanding of how theology and philosophy should be thought. These four would be the ones whom I would meet.

Interestingly, most of them are relatively accessible to me. Cayley lives in Toronto, a mere hour up the highway from me. Wangerin lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, which would be a fair drive but would be very close to Marion’s residence in Chicago, Illinois. To see the two of them on the same trip would neither be overly expensive nor exceptionally time consuming, and I am now seriously considering the possibility of making such a journey.

I am also interested to see how Pound’s demand might appear for others, so I am now referring the question to you. Who are the great writers and thinkers of our era, not speaking generally, but speaking according to their influence in you? Who would you go see? My only criterion is that they must be living, that you must be able to meet them face to face. The rest I leave to you.

Three Saturdays ago, there was a new vendor at the Farmer’s Market.  She was selling various dry goods, including a fair variety of South Asian spices, so I stopped to ask whether she had any curry leaves, a spice that I am not able to find elsewhere within walking distance.  She told me that she did not, but assured me that she would have some the following week.

I somehow missed the vendor’s stall the next week, but I found it again this past Saturday, and I remembered our conversation, so I stopped.  The vendor clearly remembered me.  Before I could even ask after the spice I wanted, she had pointed to a bag that contained, not dried curry leaves, which would have been more than satisfactory, but a whole branch, practically a small tree, of fresh curry leaves.  The price she asked was almost embarrassingly cheap, so I pretended not to have change and overpaid her an amount that I was still more than happy to pay.

I dried much of the plant, but while I still have some fresh leaves, I have been using it continually, and it has been a lovely luxury to have enough of it allow some culinary experimentation.  I have found an interesting recipe for a tomato suace that includes curry leaves, for example, and I will also be trying a potato dish that combines the fresh leaves with yoghurt and other spices.  Of course, depending on how all of this cooking turns out, I may now have to keep a curry tree or two growing on my window sill, just to feed my habit.

Graeme Ross, a friend of mine from soccer, dropped by on Wednesday afternoon to return a film that he had borrowed from me.  We had also arranged to watch a documentary over coffee while he was there, and we settled on James Longley’s Gaza Strip.  As we were watching, people were occasionally coming and going, patients of the physiotherapy and osteopathy practise that my mother-in-law runs out of our home.  One gentleman arrived a little early to pick up his wife, so he came to watch the film with us for ten minutes or so, and I was interested to see how his mere presence changed the viewing experience for me.

Prior to this gentleman’s arrival, I was focused mostly on Longley’s film, which is good but not terribly remarkable.  It uses some interesting editing techniques, including one sequence of high speed still shots interspersed with longer freeze frames, all depicting a Gaza city at night, but these experimental elements are largely outweighed by what is otherwise very conventional cinematography.  At times, it conveys surprisingly intimate moments, particularly with one young man, whose narrative forms a loose structure for the documentary, but I felt that its total effect was too loose, episodic, unfocussed, and disunified.  As I said, it was good, but not very remarkable.

The moment that our unexpected visitor arrived, however, I began to experience the film very differently.  Rather than being concerned primarily with the film itself, with its subject and technique and politics, I found myself attending also to the film as the element through which this man was first seeing me and coming to know me.  What was  he was thinking as he was sitting there with us?  Was he wondering why two grown adults were sitting around watching a documentary in the middle of a weekday afternoon?  Was he evaluating the politics of people who would watch a film that advocates so strongly for the Palestinian cause?  How, in short, was the film introducing us to him?

Suddenly, I realized how uncommon this kind of experience is.  Culturally speaking, we are not often confronted by another person first in the context of viewing a film.  We are frequently in the position of watching a film with strangers in the setting of the theatre, of course, but we are not usually confronted by these people.  They exist for us, and they help form our film experience, but we do not often recognize them in their particularity, and certainly not in a situation where the film has been selected by us in a way that it has not been by them, in a situation where the film might be understood to be representative of us in some way.

When we do watch film in a context that confronts us with others, we almost always ensure that it is in an intimate setting, with those we already know, where even the choice of film is most often made between us.  The film experience on these occasions is something that we construct among us.  It is not that we are able to determine all of the factors in this experience, but that we actively participate with each other in producing the event of the viewing, much in the way that Graeme and I arranged to meet together, chose the film together, and sat down to watch it as an event in our relationship.

When our visitor arrived, however, the viewing experience became radically altered.  Now, rather than an event taking place in an already existing relationship, it became the moment through which a relationship was begun, and a moment that was produced far more by us than by him, so that his introduction to us was almost entirely restricted to that of observation.  He was not introduced to us directly, where we might interact with him.  He was introduced merely to our choice of film, where he could only observe this choice and us through it, without over really entering into it.

I am uncertain what to make of this kind of interaction, though I think that it must occur in less obvious ways in almost every communal viewing of a film.  It is causing me to examine more closely the realtional elements that go into screening a film as factors in responding to film and to others in the context of a film viewing.  I have not yet thought very far through these ideas, and I am uncertain exactky how to procede with them, so I would appreciate any thoughts that others might be able to offer me.

There were two occurrences yesterday that reminded me again why I prefer to deal with small businesses rather than large ones.  Both stories will need a little introduction, so you may want to refill your coffee before you get started.

The first story begins with my difficulty in finding a vendor at my local market who could sell me hormone-free chickens at reasonable prices.  While I have a very good butcher there who supplies me with much of my meat, and while I have a quality farmer there who specializes in lamb, I have never been satisfied with the chicken that is available at the market.  Not only is it expensive, even for hormone-free meat, but the quality of the product is not always what I would like it to be.

Just before Christmas, however, a friend told me about Blue Haven Farm, a vendor who was selling various kinds of fowl, including heritage varieties, at a stand that I thought specialized in organic vegetables.  It took me until this past Saturday to find the time to talk with the vendor, but she was very helpful, comparing the qualities of the different fowl that she raises, showing pictures of the heritage pork that she also sells, even inviting me to come to her farm to see her operation.

Yesterday, because I had the car, which I rarely do, I took her up on her invitation, and drove my two sons to her farm, located a few miles north of Guelph.  It was cold but sunny, and our host was wonderfully hospitable.  She did not so much give us a tour as let us accompany her as she did her chores.  My sons have spent some time with cattle and with horses, but this was their first experience with swine, and my eldest was particularly impressed by the boar, which was taller than he was by several inches and came complete with a mouthful of tusks.  The swine are a heritage variety that has a gorgeous red coat, and the little ones looked particularly handsome as they ran through the snow.

We also saw different varieties of chickens and turkeys and ducks, helping a little as they were fed and watered.  The boys watched the goat being milked, though my eldest declined the offer to help in this operation.  As we walked, I talked with the owner, discovering that her family also has connections to Manitoulin Island and that she has met my father’s parents there on several occasions.  The cold prevented us from staying too long, but I hope to go back in warmer weather when there is a very young litter of piglets for the boys to see.

None of this, of course, would be possible on a larger farm.  The big factory pork operations would never allow visitors into the barns because of the risk of disease.  Many of the few remaining family operations have farm tours, which can be a revenue source for some, but these tours cannot usually provide the kind of personal attention that we received at Blue Haven.  There we were allowed to participate a little in the activities of the place, encouraged to milk goats, collect eggs, feed animals.  All of this is possible only because Blue Haven is a very small operation, even by the standards of a hobby farm.  It is essentially a house on a rural property just large enough to support a small collection of pens and outbuildings, but it offers something that is impossible for larger operations: an opportunity for others to partake in it, even if only in a very small way.  I have been on formal tours of some very impressive farm operations, including one horse stable that was truly opulent, but there was never an opportunity to be at home at these functions.  These facilities were never able to offer what the much smaller Blue Haven can only ever offer, an invitation into the life of the farm as it is lived precisely there and nowhere else.

The second story begins with the coffee roaster that my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas.  I am, if I have not already mentioned this before, deeply passionate about coffee.  I am also particular about coffee, so I am fortunate to have a local roaster just a few blocks away from me who provides me with a very good selection.  They do not, however, sell green beans, not any longer.  In fact, it seems that green beans cannot be purchased at all in Guelph, not from any of the regular coffee stores, though I have heard rumours about some underground sources.  So, I had my new roaster, but I had nothing to roast in it.

Just as I was resigning myself to the necessity of having to order something from elsewhere, I happened to see a new brand of coffee beans in the little grocery market down the street.  It was called Eco-Cafe, and it claimed to be locally roasted, though it did not specify its location.  A view of their website soon indicated that they were located in Kitchener, just a few miles from Guelph, and a phonecall then discovered that they did indeed sell green coffee beans.

So, while I had the car yesterday, I drove to Eco-Cafe.  I bought several pounds of different varieties, enough to test my roaster, but they had sold out of the variety that I really wanted.  A larger store would have been content to tell me to come back when the next shipment had arrived.  A really helpful store might even have offered to phone and let me know of its arrival.  Eco-Cafe, however, gave me the number to their warehouse so that I could let them know what I wanted, and then offered to have my beans delivered to my local grocery store so that I would not have to make another trip to Kitchener.  This kind of service is only possible from a store of that size.  It is exactly the kind of thing that makes smaller infinitely better than larger.

Advertisers and large retailers have done their best to convince consumers that we are best served by ever bigger and more comprehensive stores, that the economies of scale these stores create will result in a wider selection of better quality merchandise at lower prices.  Most of this, of course, is so untrue as to be ridiculous.  One farmer alone at my local market, one very small scale farmer, produces more varieties of fowl than are available in every major supermarket in the city combined.  One coffee roaster alone produces more varieties of coffee than all of the city’s supermarkets combined.  The quality of these products also far exceeds their supermarket equivalents.  The fowl are hormone-free and truly free-range raised.  The coffee is freshly roasted, organic, and fairly traded.  There is simply no comparison in the products.

It may be true that locally produced merchandise is often more expensive, but is it really worth the few dollars that we save at the supermarkets if it means that we have a reduced selection of lower quality merchandise delivered to us with poorer and less personal service, all so that the profits can leave our communities for large corporations elsewhere?  I would rather pay higher prices and consume less if it means that what I consume will be better, healthier, fresher, more environmentally responsible, more community supportive, more relationally committed.  I would rather pay more to the local roaster is who is willing to drive exactly what I want to the store down the street.  I would rather pay more to the local farmer who is willing to let me and my children spend the afternoon participating in the work of her farm.  These things, the smaller things, the better things, are worth any cost to me.