Told or Known

A note on how the rest of the country lives

I’m sitting in a place called Corner Bakery, which is part of the King of Prussia Mall. It’s next to the largest Crate & Barrel store I’ve ever seen in my life. This “cafe” is the size of a city block. 

Here you eat oversized cookies, soups, sandwiches and anything else you can find to fill your face. You drive here in your SUV and park as close as you can to the entrance. You listen to Frank Sinatra playing while you eat a ham and swiss grilled panini the size of my arm. Everything is wasteful: the size of this place, the amount of food on your plate, the gas guzzler you drive to get here.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Generalize much?

If I can manage to type around this panini, I might ask why millions of people would be so wasteful as to live hundreds or even thousands of miles from where their food is grown. Or why they would live in such close proximity to each other that storage of any real amount of food is prohibitively expensive, necessitating the constant just-in-time import of that distant food, and the associated energy costs.

Speaking of living in tight quarters, what about all that electricity being used to artificially light all those places that the sun can’t reach? Or to power all the elevators and water pumps needed to facilitate tall buildings’ defiance of Mother Earth’s gravity well?

I might ask all those questions, but I won’t because I understand that it’s human nature to consider your cohort more virtuous than others’, and that the reality of the situation is seldom, if ever, that simple. What you described isn’t how the rest of the country lives any more than how you live is how the rest of New Yorkers live. blog comments powered by Disqus