Fabrique En Chine

A few days ago I lamented how American manufacturing lost out to low wage foreigners by suggesting that we wanted it. Yes - we wanted the evisceration of whole towns, cities, and communities so we could save a few dollars on a toaster.

While making toast this morning, I lifted my toaster up and in bright, beautiful, black letters, written in Lucida Sans Unicode font I believe, were those comforting three words: Fabrique en Chine.

I felt good. I felt real good. The toast was good, too; not too crunchy and just the perfect shade of brown.

I felt good knowing that I saved about eight dollars and forty two cents by not having to pay an American worker to build it. His toaster is Chinese, too. I felt good knowing that I will be buying another one in five years time instead of fifteen years time, negating those savings and indeed costing more in the long run, because Chinese manufacturing is utter shit compared to domestic production.

But hey. This is what we really wanted. We wanted lives of leisure. We didn't want that smelly toaster factory anywhere near our suburbia. We wanted clean jobs in office parks, jobs that service and manage the financing and shipping of said toasters from factories in China, pitting these factories against each other to see who can fill Target/KMart/WalMart orders the cheapest, with presumably the cheapest labor.

This weekend I saw what this means to towns like TuleLake, Klamath Falls, and Malin. These towns have fallen on hard times. Granted, their livelihoods are based on high desert agriculture that's marginal even in the best of times, but little local production of value added goods from these raw materials remains.

I plied the town of TuleLake, CA, looking for the old horseradish plant and storefront that I remember from years back. I gave Christmas gifts of TuleLake horseradish (and other foods) years ago to family and I wanted to do it again this year, but the small plant was abandoned about nine years ago for cheaper, centralized processing elsewhere. The specialized goods this town used to produce is mostly gone. Horseradish is still grown there, yes, as it has been grown in the volcanic soil for generations, but it is more and more being produced and shipped in from China as Chinese horseradish can be imported cheaper than producing it here in Northern California.

But hey. This is what we really wanted.