As one ventures through a never-ending maze of an IKEA store it is incumbent to quickly find the hidden escape chutes, or suffer long-term imprisonment. And there are the huge piles of cheap stuffed toys in the kids dept. no doubt assembled at forced-work camps of the Third World.

But...there is the romance of a $1.99 breakfast with your economy-class partner and the thrill of finding a treasure in the IKEA returned -item "As is" bonepile.

A number of years ago, we assembled and re-modeled the kitchen of our Craftsman bungalow with an IKEA style that closely replicated the original and we assembled and installed a kitchen at our weekend cottage with IKEA classic birch. During the intervening years, the birch wood has aged into a rich golden glow that always invites compliments from visitors.

In all those years, not one cabinet, hinge, fastener or surface has failed and looks better than the day we installed it.

Expensive? no. Stylish? yes. Lasting? Apparently so.

I enjoyed a wonderful African breakfast, mainly Moroccan and Ethiopian, a stone's throw from Pike Place market last winter which procured locally grown inputs. I also ate at a Vietnamese restaurant that touted its reliance on local farmers and fishermen. This is what I'm looking for: cooks who can draw on their own training/culinary heritage and use locally grown products to create something new. By contrast, if you're dining on NZ lamb chops in a struggling eastern seaboard fishing community, you're living in a bubble.

Are you aware your native Michigan has a thriving regional wine industry? No doubt there are communities which are reliant on out of state wine affionadoes to stay afloat. I like cold climate grapes and would like to go, but that trip will have to await my promotion to a higher pay grade.

Last month I attended a community meeting and argued against emphasizing the evils of corporations in the movement to get people to eat local and eat better. Making it about the agriculture equivalents of Wal-Mart and Ikea will turn off people who might be interested but think it's just another lefty cause. It's not. I can see Arnold Schwarzenegger, after he serves out his term, going to Washington to promote fitness and health in some official capacity. He's not a controversial, polarizing figure and would be good at it.

I can still remember a woman down the street from us who was grossly obese. She was also from Iowa and my father would always say when we saw her, "she looks corn fed." Though she died years ago, today she would hardly stand out the way she did back then.

Unfortunately, it only skims the surface of the issues inherent in big-box consumerism and a lack of resource conservation sensibility. The limits of the article are constrained by its focus. It’s merely a commentary on the book about IKEA and the parallels that can be drawn from it with Walmart’s business model. The issues are much more complex and compound in today’s world, given the vortex of concerns invoked by global warming, global sourcing/trade, population expansion, inflation/recession dynamics and inequities of wealth distribution to name just a few.

The article seems to have spawned a letters thread that includes a nice little debate between those who advocate justifiable "consumerism" and others who favor the concept of “enoughism”. That’s certainly understandable, considering the scope of the article and the dearth of serious discussion or written works about this matter since the publication of Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”. There’s simply insufficient reliable information to allow much more than speculative advocacy about what’s better in a world seemingly circumscribed by, and captive to, so many complex issues.

It’s also unfortunate that the specter of the big-box paradigm and the commitment to relentless “lowest-cost” sourcing seem to have forever eliminated common sense alternatives offered by entrepreneurs such as Anthony “Spag” Borgatti, who famously fought back against those twin demons for as long as he could in Shrewsbury Massachusetts. The motto of his weird general store “Spags” was simply “Good Stuff Cheap”.

http://www.spags.org/

I doubt that many, other than myself, recall what that place meant to those who really appreciated a truly sensible alternative.

I see I was spot on about your having issues having nothing to do with bookshelves and coffee tables and lingonberries. The election's over. Your guy won. And he's turning out to be exactly what some of us prophesied. If that constitutes a troll in your book, so be it.

And now back to the topic at hand...

Yep, plenty of experts on consumerism.

About crap products, the squeeze on workers to produce cheap goods by working for peanuts, the decline of craftsmanship, and nary a word about the concept of "planned obsolescence?"

Does the author mention it at all, I wonder? Odd.

Several years ago I had a new colleague who inquired where he could find a cobbler. I thought for a while and said, "I don't think there are any left. People buy new shoes when the old ones wear out." He was uncomfortable with this approach to life and had nice shoes which had been made to last. We discovered there is in fact one cobbler left in town.

My parents have a refrigerator which is over 40 years old in their basement. Purchased in Indiana, it spent most of it's life in Massachusetts before coming to Pennsylvania. My Mom is a horticulturalist and uses it to grow bulbs at certain stages. From her I came to appreciate how things are grown and how to compost.

If you are a member, they will take your old PCs, cell phones, game consoles, etc., for recycling in exchange for Costco Cash (gift cards). If the stuff isn't worth anything, they will take it for free anyway.

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Productgroup.aspx?Prodid=11230482&cm_re=1-_-Right_Nav-_-ElectronicsRecycling

I'm going to check this out. It's amazing the number of spare PC keyboards, dead printers, and busted cell phones a family can accumulate in a lifetime. :)