Baked Fakery

I am admittedly enamored by certain European lifestyles. I am particularly enamored by their urban design, how they've developed their cities and countrys (sic), how they've succeeded in keeping them distinct and different from one another.

Where I live in Elk Grove we've bulldozed virtually every square inch of countryside, bermed up our creeks, bridged them over and installed hundreds of divisions of homes. In fact, our city's web portal links you to a map comprised of just our subdivisions, because that's all this city is...a subdivision wasteland with alluring names like Shadowbrook, Quail Ridge, Hampton Village, and Parkside Meadows. There ain't no meadow. Ain't any quail anymore. Ain't no village in Hampton Village and no brook in Shadowbrook.

This is a minor point in all that we are, but fake names reflect the fakeness of the people we've become, the fake people we are.

The very first thing I saw when I arrived at the Minneapolis airport earlier this month, returning from Europe, was this airport food service establishment:



I was immediately struck by its total fakery. Welcome home to America, I thought.

Really. This is a bakery? What the fuck do they bake, huh? There's nothing wrong with making $7 an hour, nothing at all, and least of all if you are employed in meaningful, dignified work. There were literally hundreds of small storefronts all over every city I visited in Europe where people baked bread daily that local residents lined up in droves to buy...and likely these bakers earned about the same as any airport food service technician in Minneapolis. But daily they prepared raw materials skillfully, meaningfully, into food they cared about providing.

Here at home, this "bakery" hires a few unskilled workers, trains them to remove their frozen pre-baked products at 3:45 AM, to thaw just enough so that when they push the muffin button on the re-heating oven the product will be ready for the morning commuter crush. The unskilled remain perpetually unskilled. The dignity of work has been removed. They don't give a shit about where they work or what they provide. "It's a job, man." And it's nothing nothing! like their company emblem

suggesting locally, daily made bread on a country morning with bluebirds aloft above and wildflowers underfoot.

Our raw material had all the nutrition stripped away at the centralized processing mill in Eastern Washington state, milled into flour by the trainload and shipped to another processing facility in Arkansas, where machines, flash freeze technology and automated palletized packaging converts the raw food materials into pre-baked "units," ready for shipment. They are loaded into tractor trailers and across our free interstate highway network they are delivered to hundreds of airport terminals. These units are assembled in the back of the Meadow with other food units derived elsewhere and presented to you as a $9 croissant sandwich.

I can be facetious about a great many things, but my presentation always rings true to an extent. The automation of our food production, the fake presentation suggesting we're grounded in a thousand year old tradition of preparation...these lead to very bad things. Oil dependence for delivering all those non-local food units; people who never learn the dignity of work and the social ills this manifests; fat Merikans, fat medical problems and fat insurance premiums; living in total isolation to our natural world. This is who we are.