I Travel To The Other Side

I used to live and work in the city.  I shopped in the city.  I bought a lot of junk and threw it and its packaging in the trash when I was finished with it.  I had no problem with it.  

Costco was fun;  things were cheap, there was lots of it and I shopped there.  I even ate the pizza.

Since then I have seen the error of my ways.  I live on the farm, rarely go into the city and try to buy as little of anything as possible.  I hate packaging.  I can't deal with it. If you want to get me angry, come by for a visit and leave your water bottle on the kitchen table for me to throw away.

I am determined to have no garbage after 2010.  I think I will make it. A few caveats probably, but pretty damn close. Plastic food wrap is the one that is making me crazy right now.  

So, we needed some shelving in a storage room here at the farm.  All the potatoes, corn, canned tomatoes, canned apple sauce, onions, garlic, shallots, winter squash and pickles are starting to be harvested and processed and there is not ample space to store it all.  A shelf was needed in the curing room.  I tried to hire a carpenter to come out and build one from the wood that is stored here from past tree millings, but he was busy and couldn't come out for months.  

I resorted to Costco.  

They sell a shelving unit that I had bought many times for the restaurant in my past life in the city.  They are cheap, well enough made and would fit nicely in the storage room.  

Right now I am assembling these crazy things that were shipped in from China.  I hate it.  Too many little bags, lots of plastic.  With luck I won't throw the shelves out in a decade when I am done with them.  As I am putting the legs together with the shelves with the little plastic connectors I keep thinking "there is someone on the other side of the planet, living in a dreary workers' dorm, who counted out these little baggies and put them in this box..."

My new way of dealing with the Costco experience is to think of it as part of a necessary relationship.  We Americans buy garbage from the Chinese, who in turn buy out Treasury notes.  As we are spending billions and billions of dollars to pay for a war and now to bail out failed banks and insurance companies, we need someone to fund our debt.  Without our buying Chinese junk, we won't have anyone to buy those notes.    

It works for me.  Shelving keeps the war effort going, keeps Washington Mutual in business, and most importantly keeps my winter squash off the floor and safe through the winter.