Kaulapi World

For a side project this summer I drove up to MD this past weekend to get an Earth Box, supposedly an idiot-proof planter system that has high yields for growing small scale fruits and vegetables. It came with some fertilizer, CaCO3 mix for growing tomatoes and supposedly set up with a reservoir system that makes it impossible for you to over or under water the plants. I started off with a celebrity tomato plant, some Thai basil for pho, Chinese parsley and Italian basil for pasta. I’m in the process of germinating some seeds to see if I grow some Okinawan goya as well although I don’t know if it’ll work.

I think it might be my mom’s influence as well who grows just about everything in her yard back home. Or part of it is from reading articles about citizens living on an isolated island giving up their domestic agricultural industries (AKA food?) based on the faith that the regular shipments of cargo won’t be affected by a spike in oil prices or geopolitical crisis. Maybe its this lingering concern that maybe one day the consumption bubble will burst and those who have skills in producing goods will be in a better position than those who just produce services.

Who knows, maybe trying to grow stuff, even on a micro-scale and mostly symbolic way may be the start of a personal struggle with this consumer identity that pretty much become a way of life. I recall reading lots of articles in grad school and around the web talking about the shift from manufacturing and agriculture to strictly service industry, and what are the potential implications of this in the long term economies of the world. While all economies require producers of goods and consumers of those goods, and that as economies become more service-based, they are more driven by consumption of goods produced in other countries. As things stand now the service-industry countries are the richer ones, more or less dictating the market prices while importing the hard goods that their respective companies no longer produce because it costs cheaper to buy it overseas.

Eventually we become a nation of service providers who produce nothing really other than our “expertise” which unfortunately can sometimes materialize in bureaucracy, pushing paper skills and a lot of bullshit. Irony, I think this service skill set describes me and pretty much everyone I know in terms of our formal education - although its true my day job is in the production of policy analysis, research, and reports, and eventually I’ll be providing legal services or producing legal work products, it would be nice to actually produce or create something down to earth once in a while. Also with this outsourcing there are very serious vulnerabilities to service industry-based economies as a result of this shift, we become more dependent on international political stability, free trade trade agreements, and of course cheap oil to transport the goods that we consume but do not produce. Everything is dependent on cheap energy for communications and transportation, otherwise the service-based industries would eventually starve.

One sign of becoming a yuppie is to do more grocery shopping at Whole Foods and be tempted by all of their latest promotions and organic goodies, and actually not be totally fazed out by the higher prices. I think for some produce and meats I definitely do taste a difference. I have begun to appreciate quality over quantity, with some exception of course. I remember talking to a friend about his refusal to buy anything organic on the basis that it is overpriced for the amount of food you actually get. This is someone who loves to shop at Walmart, and refuses to even consider the arguments presented in Fast Food Nation, or Super-Size me as having any merit at all.

I do agree that part of being an informed consumer, you have to remind yourself the misconceptions of organic food in general, especially lately how it has become more a marketing tactic. Maybe it always was, maybe not, who knows. In part I suppose we have to trust our own judgment and make our own decisions for what a particular good or service is worth. Again, everything is relative, overhearing a conversation at the the local farmer’s market gave another perspective as the person was bashing whole foods as an evil corporation.