New perspectives on materialism have generated lots of different words… SLOW (Slow Food, Slow Cities, Slow Life…) is “seeking to do everything at the right

They’re diluting the olive oil with canola to save money. I paid $14 for the feta and now I’m furious. Charge me more, but don’t cut corners.

This is a story is about falling in love with food. It’s about working for something because it’s beautiful, and hoping the money will be enough to keep doing it – a story that I keep running into while distractedly turning a corner. It’s about a search for meaning in the money, connection in the contract.

Yet Mogannam insists that he’s not in it for the money. “I like to feed people,” he says. “I like to have fun. I like to do things that make a difference. Money is secondary. It’s always been secondary, and I think that’s why we’ve been able to do so well.”

Chad Robertson is the bread baker at Tartine, San Francisco. He makes the most beautiful bread he can, because he wants to. He doesn’t try to make too much of it. (Just 175 loaves a day, which sell out in an hour.) He’s analytical, thoughtful, directed, probably brilliant. But he “wants to work with my hands”. Reprint of article from San Francisco Magazine (defunct).

If the regard that many people now have for the wider ramifications of their food choices could be brought to our relationships to our own automobiles, it could sustain pockets of mindful labor

The professions maintain the status quo through the work they define and permit. In the social sciences it is publishing highly specialized articles in elite journals. In medicine it is “patching people up…never to take a stand against the social inequities that generate so much stress and disease.”