slaughterhouse workers were part of the inspiration for henry ford’s moving assembly line. this is the most interesting fact learned on a tour of the river rouge factory in dearborn.
Federal supermarket resolution -
Very exciting: Congressional reps introduce supermarket/food-access legislation, modeled after Pennsylvania’s fairly successful Fresh Food Financing Initiative.
The many problems with fair trade, via The Guardian—and an intelligent summary of the piece on Slate’s Daily Bread/Big Money.
Philly's food desert gets a supermarket -
Nice, quick piece on new supermarket, funded in part by Pennsuylvania’s landmark Fresh Food Initiative—and a farmer making inroads in a neighborhood that’s been unable to attract a supermarket of its own.
Told you so: Whole Foods Republicans -
An erudite explanation of why lifestyle choices are actually not sufficient substitutes for political and social movement.
Also: I am not convinced that “the white working class shrinking and the educated ‘creative class’ growing” to such an extent that we can say that America is becoming better-educated. Specific classes of Americans are becoming more educated; the working class is not as white as it was in mid-20th century. These two facts do not add up to a better-educated, less-working class country.
Interestingly, in Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam point out in Grand New Party (and I don’t have that book handy, so take this with a grain of salt), the Democrats in the 1960s or so attempted a similar feat—running after the expanding socially conscious, well-educated classes. A half-century later, Democrats are easy to pigeonhole as latte-drinking, elite liberals in part because those were the voters the party sought out.
I am still waiting for the day when someone articulates a politics that is grounded in working-class experience (and, keep in mind, families earning $35,000 and less a year are the fastest-growing market segment in the U.S.) but intelligent and principled all the same.