Weblog Entry

Good morning ALFN members,

What a wonderful day to begin another week on the “market”:http://littlerock.locallygrown.net/market! I love this season in the ALFN market when the cybernetic seams are stretched with the bounty of summer choices. This is the time to let tomato juice dribble down your chin and gorge on fresh food. This is also the time to can and freeze the foods you love miss the most in the winter.

We had a successful pilot run with the dry goods on the market. We will continue to have dry good available in the coming months as a pre-order option. Just head over to the dry goods section on the market to order. Don’t forget to check out the heirloom tomatoes, fresh okra and mixed sweet pepper options available right now.

Shared Economy

Recently, I read a profound description of modern life and the desires cultivated by our over-capitalized world. Ricky D’Ambrose suggested the modern lifestyle is “available only in an affluent, wasteful, appetitive society such as ours, committed to reckless uses of limited energy, built upon extravagance and speed, crammed with unremitting secondhand desires that are hugely disproportionate to what most of us are capable of ever achieving.” Have you every wondered whether the desires that well up within you are your own or recycled desires from unsustainable economy based on unlimited consumption? Secondhand desires are passions seeded by marketing. Through mass media, reality is presented as a new glossed surface promising a life based on mirage. However, I think we can redeem “secondhand desires” by refusing to take part in an economy and worldview of obsolescence. I’m interested in the market exchange of used and recycled goods. As the limited resources of planet earth begin to run thin, human economy must move to a shared, recycled economy.

Want to hear more? Here are two cool resources. From the Story of Stuff folks, listen to the podcast on how to open up to the market forces of sharing. Inevitably, you may find yourself at a website called Yerdle. On this site you can swap items with folks in a cyber share-exchange…check it out!

Have a great week!