Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

“1998 A Solid Year For New Products.”  Quirk’s Marketing Research Review  June 1999 Page 44

The stock market may have had its ups and downs in 1998, but things were solid on the new product front.  For the second year in a row, packaged goods firms pumped out more than 25, 000 new food, beverage, health & beauty aids, household and pet products, according to Naples, N.Y. -based Marketing Intelligence Service, Ltd., a new product reporting firm.  While 1998’s count didn’t eclipse 1997’s record, there was no shortage of new products to choose from on store shelves

Topping, Dick.  "Innovation is the Growth Engine for Growth."  Appliance Engineer July 1999, Page 67

What do Amazon.com, Nokia, Ritz Carlton, and Daimler-Chrylser have in common?  Or how about Coke, Dell, and Hasbro?  If you said innovation, you're right.  These companies represent a wide range of industries and lines of business, but they are each industry leaders in the battle for market share and earnings.  The tie that binds them is their ability to redefine their business models and processes to create breakthroughs.  That's innovation.  And, it leads to growth.

So where does the appliance industry place in the race for innovation?  Unfortunately, it doesn't, too well.  Most OEMs are still locked in a struggle to compete on price with strategies focused on cost-reduction and quality improvement, rather than innovation.  But the shortcomings of cost-reduction have begun to surface -- companies can't cut their way to growth.  Wall Street recognizes the difference between incremental improvements from cost-cutting and the long-term promise of increased earnings from innovation.  That recognition shows up in the form of premiums awarded in the market value of noted innovators.

One appliance producer seems committed to change, however.  Boasting a 10-percent hike in share price and a 15-percent increase in appliance sales -- an all-time high for the company ---  Maytag Corporation is growing its shareholder value through an innovation strategy.  Known as Intelligent Innovation, Maytag's strategy connects its new technologies and new thinking to the whole idea of appliance design.   Rather than competing on cost, Maytag actually charges more for its products because Intelligent Innovation improves the total product:  service,  functionality, interface, design, etc., and results in superior product performance.   Intelligent Innovation is Maytag's game plan for success.  It's how the company interacts with consumers, reinforces the strength of its premium brands, increases sales volume in upper price segments, and enhances profit margins.  The share price indicates that the return on Maytag's investment is paying off.

In a recent global survey on innovation, 85 percent of senior executes surveyed cited innovation as one of the top five critical success factors to growth.  Yet only 15 percent thought they did an adequate job of managing innovation.  Simply choosing and stating a strategy does not ensure that it will take hold.  Innovation as a strategy is hard to achieve.  Barriers exist on both the technology and market/customer intelligence fronts.  In technology-driven industries like appliances, there is often a technology-push mentality or a poor understanding of the link between technologies, products, and markets.  There is also the frequent misconception that innovation is exclusively the responsibility of R&D.  Maytag's got it right.  Innovation is about everything a company does: products, processes, services, and performance, and everyone in the organization plays a part.

Although product innovations can rejuvenate a company, one of the more difficult tasks is changing an organization's mindset and culture -- linking operational excellence and product innovation through people.  To develop and operate effective innovation processes such as idea generation and screening, information/intelligence gathering, and planning, an organization is challenged to work across functional and often business boundaries.  To overcome this obstacle, an organization needs to make a conscious decision to not only change the overall corporation's vision and strategy, but also change the mindset and culture of the organization.   The culture change at Maytag occurred by actually integrating the vision and strategy with the business plans.   Maytag created an environment where people thought, "I'm playing in the innovation arena, but I'm also contributing because I'm making my operations better."

Innovation is also hard to achieve because it is easily confused with a short-term, one-time breakthrough, a creative line extension, or a new technology.  However, companies who live innovation know that it can actually be measured and managed in a continuous, long-term process.   Some characteristics to monitor include rapid learning, risk taking, recognition and rewards, consumer and customer insights, elevated R&D importance, innovation networks, and manufacturing and operations processes improvements.

As an organization that now shares technologies, ideas, and people, it is not afraid to try new ideas and challenge the status quo.  Maytag's COO, Lloyd Ward said, "We're developing a new model where innovation is institutionalized in the culture to yield a consistent and powerful driver of growth and long-term competitive advantage."

Dana Ullman, Time Bandits California

Labor saving devices may not be saving us that much time, according to a study reported in American Demographics (Jan. 1997).  Women with microwave ovens for instance, spent just four minutes less per day preparing food than women without microwaves.  And women with washing machines actually spent more time doing laundry than those without.  No word on how much time men were saving by ignoring these chores completely.

“One Microwave is no Longer Enough for Many Consumers.”  Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, December 1998, Page 56

American consumers are declaring that one microwave is not enough, according to Decision Analyst, Inc., an Arlington, Texas, marketing research firm.  In the American Appliance Survey of 6,431 households, Decision Analyst discovered that one out of every 10 consumers has purchased a second, and in some cases, a third microwave oven.

Wright, Steven.  The Wisdom of Steven Wright.  Downloaded from his web site.

I just bought a microwave fireplace...  You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes...

Survey Monitor.  Quirk’s Marketing Research Review November 1998  Page 54

No time for breakfast.  Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day, but it is the meal most often skipped by Americans (55 percent).  It’s also the easiest meal toprepare and the shortest one to eat:  38 percent of respondents to a TeleNation poll conducted for BSMG Worldwide said they spend five to 10 minutes eating breakfast.

Architecture Magazine December, 1999

Percentage of Americans who order take-out food at least once a day:    21
Percentage of Americans who order take-out food every other day         26
  
Greg Critser, Fat Land.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ISBN 0618164723
Page 55
For the leaders of many American congregations, the challenge of the era was competing with the permissiveness rising in secular America.  That meant “a little bit o’ sugar,” as one pastor recalls.  Along with literalist, moral preaching about things like homosexuality and abortion would come a new tolerance for “the little sins.”  (Later on, when many of the new leaders had had their own personal failings televised widely, this doctrine became self-protective as well.)  New seminarians were thus told that “holding the flock together” meant accentuating similarities.  The same thing was taking place within more liberal circles.  At places like fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, the student bookstore carried more titles about self-acceptance than it did about traditional moral failings.  (Asked where a book about gluttony or sloth might be shelved, a visitor was told:  “Where else?  In self-help.”)  The end result of this reorientation, as Marie Griffith says, was that “the American church became like therapy.  It was suddenly all about love and tolerance and acceptance, not about individual discipline.’

There is, of course, a societal cost to religion’s abandonment of the little sins.  Religion, like belts or modest meal portions or argumentative family dinners, is a maker of boundaries.  Religious beliefs generate the development of moral communities, which, in turn, serve to guide and constrain the action of individuals.  As the sociologist Emile Durkheim observed early in the twentieth century, without a religion’s “system of interdicts,” a society will flounder.  (Toynbee agreed, albeit in a secular manner, by noting that the disintegration of a civilization is always marked by a “surrender to a sense of promiscuity.”)  The relevant point here is clear.  If, as Durkheim concluded, God and society “are only one,” can there ever be a little sin, at least where religion is concerned?

Page 56
By the ‘90s, with such purely theological considerations, aside, scholars who studied the sociology of religion began t notice a growing trend:  Not only did religion no longer address overconsumption, it seemed somehow implicated in just the opposite—in aiding and abetting overeating.  In a 1998 study looking at 3500 U.S. adults, the Purdue university sociologist Kenneth F. Ferraro sought to find out the answer to two interrelated questions:  One, was religion related to body weight, especially obesity, and two. did religion intensify, mitigate, or counterbalance the effects of body weight o well-being?  to the first, the answer was qualified:  Obesity was highest in states where religious affiliation was highest, but the specific differences in body weight between groups were more likely explained by differences in class, ethnicity, and marital status.  Of all the religious groups surveyed, Southern Baptists were heaviest, followed by Fundamentalist and Pietistic Protestants.  Catholics fell at the middle of the list, while the lowest average body weight was found among Jews and non-christians.  Surveying attitudes within those groups, Ferraro concluded that obesity was associated with higher levels of religiosity.  If one calculated in the fact that many of these believers were also of low socioeconomic status, on could almost conclude that eating and religion had become a unified coping strategy.  “Consolation and comfort from religion and from eating,” Ferraro wrote, “may be a couple of the few pleasures accessible to populations which are economically and politically deprived.”

To the second question—did modern religion act to inhibit gluttony or obesity—the answer was more surprising. It didn’t.  Instead, the church has become a nest of unqualified social acceptance.  As Ferraro wrote”  There is no evidence of religion operating as a moral constraint on obesity.”  Instead, Ferraro went on, “higher religious practice was more common among overweight persons, perhaps reflecting religion’s emphasis upon tolerating human weakness and its emphasis upon other forms of deviancy such as alcoholism, smoking and sexual promiscuity.”

Page 57
Ferraro warned that it wasn’t that religion indirectly promoted higher body weight.  Rather, most pastors simply saw obesity and overeating as too risky a subject.  “They feel they would risk alienating the flock—at least at this point,” say Ferraro.  “In that sense we are in a stage with obesity like we were with smoking in the 1950s and 1960s.”
And so when it came to overeating, gluttony, and obesity, Christians, like everyone else in America, were in deep, deep denial.  As Jerry Falwell said when he heard about Ferraro’s findings, “I know gluttony is a bad thing.  But I don’t know many gluttons.”

Gilbreth, Frank B. Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.  Belles on Their Toes. United States:  1950. ISBN 055325605X, Pages 101-2

Mother planned, on paper, an efficiency-type kitchenette of the kind used today in a good many apartments.  Under her arrangement, a person could mix a cake, put it in the oven, and do the dishes, without taking more than a couple of dozen steps.  On the strength of her blueprints, she landed a contract with a New York electric concern.  The fee was one Dad wouldn’t have considered.  But it was the first job Mother had got on her own, and she was proud of it.

Someone in the electric company told the newspapers about the contract.  A woman engineer with eleven children was considered good copy, and in 1924 the idea of a scientifically planned kitchen was news.  The company arranged a press conference for Mother in New York.  The resulting stories, besides telling of Mother’s plans, managed to give the impression that our kitchen in Montclair also was a model of efficiency.

Actually, the exact opposite was true.  Our kitchen, the one Tom used, was a model of inefficiency.  Not that there was a handpump over the sink or a spit to roast fowls on, but it was almost that bad.  Our house had been built when the stress was on spaciousness, and the original owner had planned the kitchen to accommodate three or four servants. When Tom baked a cake, or baked what he said was a cake, he had to walk about half a mile.  The distance from the sink, which was at a back-breaking level, to the old-fashioned gas stove was a good twenty feet.  The food was kept in a pantry twenty feet from the stove and forty from the sink.  And the dishes were in a butler’s pantry, about the same distance away but in the opposite direction.

The refrigerator was in an alcove by itself.  To get to it, you had to detour around a stand holding the bird cage; around a table holding Tom’s tools, a plumber’s friend, western story magazines, and back copies of The Newark Star-Eagle; and usually around Mr. Chairman, or Fourteen, or both.  But on the strength of the write-ups about the contract, a newsreel man phoned Mother and said he’d like to bring a crew to Montclair to photograph her in her efficiency kitchen.  “I’d love to have you,” Mother told him, “but you see we haven’t set up the efficiency kitchen there at the house.” 

“I don’t believe that would be exactly suitable,” Mother gulped.

Campbell, Allison “Meet Lisa Kempston: homemaker, teacher, wife, mother and efficiency expert” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Minn., 06/01/1999

ST. PAUL, Minn. - It’s no summer shower of activity when Lisa Kempston cooks. It’s a four-day thunderstorm. The full-time homemaker releases lightning bolts of energy as she bustles about the kitchen, doubling, tripling and quadrupling recipes to feed her family of five for an entire year.

By the end of the weekend-long cooking marathon, a freezer the size of a hot tub will be filled to capacity with meatballs, enchiladas, lasagna and other family favorites. But for Kempston, the superhuman effort - even the National Enquirer featured her, referring to her as a “kitchen magician” - is worthwhile. In the long run, it saves her time, stress and money….

Luckily, Kempston finds organizing fun. During her cooking binge, she prepares about 150 family-size entrees and individual dishes, using 29 recipes - she’s still searching for a magical combination of 30. Once she decides on the recipes, she collates the grocery list. This year, she divided the shopping into two trips: perishables and nonperishables. When she gets home, she tapes up the recipes on her cupboard doors and stacks the groceries around the kitchen.

Using an assembly-line method, she prepares the food. A few months after the Big Cook, Kempston shops for bread. Some of her favorite places are Turtle Bread Company, Breadsmith and Great Harvest. She tops the loaves with cheese and garlic and freezes them for later.  Kempston is so freezer-fixated that, when the subject of Thai food is brought up, she says, “That freezes well…”

Even she had to ease into it. When she first married 10 years ago, she prepared an entire week’s worth of dinners on the weekend. Then, after Alex was born, she cooked every two months. “I was getting spoiled - very spoiled,” Kempston says. “I went to four months at about the time Kate was born.” After becoming comfortable with that schedule, she decided to stretch it farther. “I went to a year, which is a little much, but there’s no going back.” That mindset carries over into the rest of her cooking. At bake sale time, Kempston and the kids make hundreds of cookies. “I can’t make anything and not triple the recipe,” she says. “It’s just not efficient.

“’90s-style Dining In:  Grocer does the Cooking.” USA TODAY March 9, 1998, Page 4D

Supermarkets have gone “from being a purveyor of pantry goods to a purveyor of meals,” says Dave Litwak of Supermarket Business.  Americans are buying. 
Between 1986 and 1996, service deli sales jumped 126% to $21.1 billion, according to Supermarket Business studies.  From October 1996 to October 1997 alone, sales of refrigerated entrees jumped 34% according to market research firm Information Resources Inc.  None of this comes cheap.  Precooked green beans pre-tossed in a pre-made balsamic vinaigrette can cost 10 to 15 times more than the same amount of raw beans.

Bodley John. H.  Anthropology And Contemporary Human Problems.  California: 1983.  ISBN 0874846714, Page 118

The food systems of industrial nations represent an enormous advance in the evolutionary progress and a proportionate loss in long-run adaptive success.

The primary distinguishing feature of these systems is their fossil fuel energy subsidy, which permits very high crop yields for very low inputs of human energy.  Other critical aspects are the extreme complexity of the production-consumption chain, and the tendency to increase the per capita energy and resource cost of food consumption through expanded dependence on synthetic and highly processed foods and inefficiently produced animal protein.

These systems are not only far more costly in terms of per capita demands for energy and resources, but they are unquestionably more frail than tribal systems, they demand much more intensive ecosystem management, and they have greater potential for environmental deterioration.  Perhaps, most critically, they can clearly not be sustained at present rates of increase or even at present levels unless they are radically restructured.  It is also very doubtful that, if such systems diffuse, they could be supported at all on a global basis, given present population levels.

These are critical issues because the present strategy for solving the world food crisis not only ignores the fact that many of the problems are inherent features of state-level cultures based on intensive food production systems, but also makes the dangerous assumption that industrial food systems will feed the world if only they can be established everywhere.

William R. Greer, “In The ‘Lite’ Decade, Less Has Become More” New York Times, August 13, 1986, Page A1

Sociologists say that “lite,” which started as a marketing term used to denote dietetic products, has become a metaphor for what Americans are seeking in disparate parts of their lives.  In their relationships, for example, they have turned away from soul-searching and stress of emotional commitment; at the movies, they would rather watch an invincible hero, like Rambo or the Karate Kid, who never lets the audience down.

The Light Decade is a time when men and women can “fall in love without paying the price,” as a Honda Civic advertisement promises.  They can undergo psychoanalysis in one sitting, because today’s psychotherapy skips the formative years, namely childhood.  For health care, busy executives can turn to a so-called Doc in a Box, a storefront medical clinic with extended hours, higher prices and no appointment, no referral—no medical history necessary.

There is light culture (books on tape), light shopping (buying clothes by video), light politics (candidates who run on image, not issues), light responsibility (the lowest voter participation rates of any democracy) and light music (Lite FM, where the heavy bass line has been removed so that the sound does not jar or stir listeners).  And, of course, there is light food, with which people can cut calories without changing their diets by using products like Jell-O Light, Cornitos Light Corn Chips, Heinz Lite Ketchup; and Glace Lite, which, its manufacturer, Sweet Victory, says “gives you all the rich, delicious pleasures of 300-calorie premium ice cream” at 100 calories a scoop.

Food, notably dietetic food, is where the Light Decade started.  It is also the clearest example of how the philosophy has caught on.  “Lite,” or “light,” foods are now “one of the fastest growing segments of the American food industry,” according to a recent Federal Food and Drug administration report.

Before the 16th century, the word “lite” meant “little, not much, few” in English and was pronounced differently from “light,” according to Traugott Lawler, a medievalist at Yale University.  But the word fell out of use.

Today’s “lite” is used to indicate fewer calories or less salt, and essentially refers to weight in the same way that  ight is a reference to weight, Mr. Lawler said.  The effect of light foods on weight loss has been, well, light.

“We know that the number of people who are obese has increased in the past 10 years,” said Thomas A Wadden, a psychologist at the Obesity Research Group of the University of Pennsylvania.  “And the percentage of children who are obese is increasing.”

Bernard Phillips, a sociologist at Boston University, calls the Light Decade a “smorgasbord” approach to life, where people convince themselves that they can have the best of all worlds, immediately, by having a lightened version of
everything.

“What happens is the light things become a gloss to fool ourselves into thinking that we are getting what we want,” he said.  “When you go to the supermarket and buy light beer, this is getting you away from the notion that there are serious problems with your not being able to lose weight.  You don’t face the weight problem.  You go for the quick fix.”

Clinton R. Sanders, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut who studies popular culture, says the mobility of American society, both geographically and economically, has helped to bring about a Light Decade.  “When you  have one out of four Americans moving every year, then one’s connection to people and objects become very light,” he said.  “if we know that we are not going to have  those friends next year, then we are not going to define them as being as important as we would if we were going to have an ongoing relationship with them.”

Dr. Sanders says that geographic mobility has increased the number of relationships based on daily routines and necessities, rather than on a shared background or common interests.

“The kinds of relationships we have most are secondary,” he said.  “They are light relationships, instrumental relationships.  I don’t go down to the grocery store to have a conversation with the checkout girl.”

That same lack of attachment is evident in the appliances people buy today.   Because modern technology has made them inexpensive, and because Americans generally have a high standard of living, appliances have become cheaper to replace than to repair.  They are what Dr. Sanders calls “light appliances, built to fall apart.”

Jerry Knight, The Fat Track TRENDLINES Now We’re a Nation of Lite-Heavyweights

We guzzle $15 billion worth of diet soft drinks a year.  We gobble up $2.4 billion worth of Healthy Choice, Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine and the like and choke down another $1.7 billion worth of Ultra Slim-Fast, appetite suppressants and pseudo-foods.  Our role models are Tommy Lasorda, Jenny Craig, Richard Simmons, Susan Powter and, on-again, off-again, Oprah.

But still we get fat. The average American put on eight pounds between 1980 and 1991, and now one in three adults in the United States is certifiably overweight, the National Center for Health Statistics reported recently. That’s 2 billion new pounds of avoidable avoirdupois among us, an extra 1 million tons of tummy that took root during a decade when the diet business was growing even faster than our waistlines.

Other research by the Calorie Control council, a trade association for diet food makers, shows that 90 percent of U.S. adults now routinely consume foods labeled “diet,” “light,” “reduced calorie,” “low fat” or some such promise. 
That’s up from 81 percent last year and 76 percent in 1992, thanks to a steady proliferation of products created to satisfy the demand for foods with a caloric advantage. Logically, those industry growth lines ought to be moving in opposite directions from statistical tape measures of our waistlines.  If we’re eating more low-cal stuff, we shouldn’t be getting fatter.
  
“Salty Snacks Need a New Name”,  The Shopper Report, February 1988, Page 3, “Expectations of Efficiency”

Today’s consumers want to shop with less time and hassle.  They count on high technology and computer supported services to smooth out stress producing situations and to support reduced hassle lifestyles and shopping styles. Computer clicks, beeps, and whirrs have become sounds of security that signal that things are working.

Automatic teller machines that provide 24 hour clickety-click access to checking and saving accounts have become routine and reliable facts of life.  Supermarket scanners, where every click means another successful scan, have become faster and more efficient.  The proportion of scan failures and time consuming price lookups seems to be diminishing.  Thanks to VCR’s, TV shows can be taped for viewing at the consumers’ instead of the presenters’ convenience. 

Thanks to microwaves, hot foods can be speedily zapped without watching over them to make sure they don’t burn and without even bothering with a pot.

Given all this speed and efficiency, consumers are becoming more critical and even arrogant about the sloppy  systems and human factor inefficiencies they find in many retail operations.  They are increasingly shopping at  stores that provide more services and fewer hassles.

  
“No Free Lunch Is Fast Becoming No Lunch” Facilities Design & Management, June  1996, Page 12

About 55% of office workers say they engage in other activities besides eating during their lunch hour, according to the Steelcase Workplace Index, a semiannual survey that gauges workplace trends in the United States.  And out of that group, nearly 40% say they now use their lunch hour to catch up in extra work.

Office workers take, on average, only 36 minutes for lunch each day, with 14% not taking any time for lunch, according to the survey.  Office workers in the Northeast and those earning above $50,000 are most likely to skip lunch altogether (20%).

  
Mitchell, Tedd, M.D.  "HealthSmart."  USA Weekend  February 11-13, 2000. Page 4

CONSIDER THIS:  In the 1960s, the typical American diet was about 40% fat; today, 34%.  Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, during that same period, obesity has increased by about 30%!  How can it be that we're eating less fat and getting fatter?  Just look at the calories we consume.  In 1978, the average calorie intake was 1,969 a day; 1990, 2,200 calories a day.

  
Alfino, Mark., John S. Caputo, and Robin Wynyard.  Critical Essays on Consumer Culture.   U.S.A.:  1998.  ISBN 0275958191
Page 182
Our goal is not so much to reconstruct Baudrillard’s theoretical position as to see how it contributes to the postmodern attitude toward McDonald’s.  The “scandal”  of Baudrillard”s theory is that we have to begin by saying that a trip to McDonald’s is not about eating.  McDonald’s is not selling hamburgers which first satisfy our hunger and happen also to have various social connotations.  Rather, as a form of consumption, eating at McDonald’s is about consuming (and reproducing) the message of McDonald”s.

And what is that?  Foremost, the patron experiences a peculiar kind of abundance.  Every meal is a “value” meal.   Every meal is a “complete” meal, affordable by almost anyone.  Like a visitor to a third world country, the patron at McDonald’s is supposed to feel that his or her money (and concomitantly his or her own feeling of wealth and value) is worth more.  Advertising for McDonald’s consistently presents a fantasy land of play and abundance.  Second, as we have already noted, the McDonald’s slogan implies a deserved reward.

Fumento, Michael.  The Fat of the Land:  The Obesity Epidemic and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves.  New York:  1997.  ISBN 0670870595, Pages 51 and 271

In the last hundred years there has been an absolute revolution in labor-saving devices.  Many of these are wonderful, none more so probably than the indoor toilet that saves a trudge through cold and rain to the outhouse.  But many do little more than save a bit of labor.... Individually, labor-saving devices don’t add up to much.  But together they play an important role in the obesity problem....

Many factors of fairly recent development have led to the obesity epidemic. Food has become so cheap that not only can the poorest Americans be fat but indeed it appears the poorest Americans are the fattest.  Labor-saving devices continue to proliferate.  Television has more variety than ever and has now been joined by web-surfing as a major  sedentary activity.  And with any major introduction of something that affects our culture, there is a “shakeup”  period in which we learn to adjust.  Consider, for example, automobiles.  Even though they were much slower when they started to come into wide use about a century ago, their per capita accident and death rates were appalling by today’s standards.  But over time we adjusted.  Traffic laws were passed, roads were improved, myriad safety devices appeared.  The result is that death rates have steadily declined and continue to do so.

Dieting usually fails in the long run, study finds

But is it better to have lost and gained than never to have lost at all?
“If dieting worked, there would be a bunch of skinny people walking around,” said obesity researcher Dr. David Katz, head of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center.

Updated: 4:29 p.m. ET April 22, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Roberta Perry has tried it all to lose the pounds — organized diet programs, prescription pills, psychotherapy, even hypnosis.
Those efforts worked for a while for the Pennsylvania woman, but the weight inevitably crept back up. After years of yo-yo dieting, Perry realized it would take more than gimmicks to slim down.
“As much as I would like to have a magic bullet, I knew the only way to lose weight was eat less and exercise more,” said the 39-year-old public relations consultant.
Her experience is a common one. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, examining 31 weight-loss studies found long-term dieting doesn’t keep the pounds off. While people can lose weight initially, many relapse and regain the weight they shed.
The findings confirm what many scientists have been saying all along: Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is another story.
“If dieting worked, there would be a bunch of skinny people walking around,” said obesity researcher Dr. David Katz, head of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, who did not participate in the latest study.
Since the 1970s, the ranks of overweight and obese Americans have risen with two-thirds of adults in that category. Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. Being overweight increases blood pressure and cholesterol levels which can lead to heart disease.
Many factors can conspire against successful weight reduction, health experts say. Diets can be boring and there’s always a temptation to return to old habits. Serial dieters may also become discouraged and give up when their weight plateaus. People who lose too much too soon don’t learn to make the overall lifestyle changes — eating healthier foods and exercising regularly — that are necessary to keep their weight stable.
“It’s just plain difficult to modify your diet and turn away from the pleasures of eating,” said Michael Goran, an obesity researcher at the University of Southern California. “We’re driven to eat.”

Few success stories

The UCLA researchers analyzed 31 diet studies that followed people two to five years after they went on diets. Between one-third and two-thirds gained back the weight they lost. A small number were able to successfully maintain their weight loss.
The UCLA study did not compare individual fad diets or organized weight-loss programs.
“We’re not saying don’t make some kind of effort,” said Traci Mann, the UCLA psychologist who led the study. “It means that people should be quite clear that a diet is a temporary fix.”
The study appeared in the April issue of American Psychologist, a publication of the American Psychological Association.
Perry, who owns a public relations firm in suburban Philadelphia, was an “emotional eater” who found comfort in food whenever she felt angry or depressed.
For the past 20 years, Perry tried all sorts of diets with mixed success. More recently, she decided to change her lifestyle and focus on lowering her cholesterol rather than obsessing about her weight.
The result: Perry, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall, has kept her weight steady for the past two years — 250 pounds from a high of 325 pounds. Although still obese, she is no longer considered morbidly obese.
“I would like to be healthier. I would like to be a little more toned,” she said. “But I’m not running out the door to join another program so I can lose weight and go back on that cycle.”

Risks of seesawing

It’s unclear whether repeatedly losing and gaining weight leads to health problems. But some studies have found a link between seesawing weight and problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and gallbladder disease.

Stumpf, Bill.  The Ice Palace That Melted Away.  New York: 1998.  ISBN 0375402217, Pages 17, 35 and 45

Imagine that McDonald’s restaurants, the world’s largest retailer of hamburgers, were redesigned to honor labor and production as well as merchandising and speed.  What would it look like? Imagine that they baked their own buns on the spot.  How much better it would smell!  Imagine machines making ketchup, mashing tomatoes, and spouting steam.  Or machines grinding meat and pressing it into burgers.  Perhaps the economies of scale necessary for McDonald’s to sell us their food so cheaply would preclude a bakery in every franchise.  But what would happen if we could witness the activity and energy of the staff making our meals—in the heart of the restaurant in full view of you and me. 

A restaurant I know of treats its customers to a regular show of chefs and assistants doing a culinary dance behind large glass dividers and the food issuing from the visible kitchen.  They aren’t afraid to show anything.  A giant material muncher could recycle all the food packaging on the spot and spit out new cups, bags, and trays.  We could give children a sense of production that seemed a part of their lives. Rarely in America is labor associated with fun....

Every day, they walked to the farmers’ markets, and on Sunday afternoon they had barbecues at family-oriented taverns.  They always bought fresh bread at ethnic bakeries on the corner, had fresh milk and produce delivered to their doors, felt safe in their beds, and even had time to polish what little silverware they owned.  Somehow they lived to old age, raised a large family, all of whom went to college, survived prohibition, the Depression, two world wars, rationing, gender inequality, polio, TB, and measles.  In short, they were like millions of Americans.

My grandfather never sought permission to live less hurriedly, less like a consumer, less oblivious to time.  He never sought recognition for doing so.  I would sorely like to have a little of his independence.  I often find joy in walking the dog, washing the car, shopping for fresh vegetables, cooking dinner, or hanging up my clothes—the details of life.  But somehow looming over me is a great, importunate world where existence and one’s daily routing are measured out in nanoseconds.  Sometimes I feel like just another petty functionary enmeshed in the classic carrot-and-stick game, trussed in my work harness, blinders in place, ready to go, eating from a bag tied to my head,
defecating on the street while I work, running in place on my Nordic Track, apparently willing to work myself to death.

Just Say No to Gadgets and Gizmos, An Easy Guide to Reclaiming Our Humanity and Simple Ways By Ken Ringle, Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 29, 2002; Page F01
If you feel that high-tech has turned our holidays into the direst of wolves, snarling with electronic toys, staring like digital cameras and rapacious as a DVD burner, Nicols Fox wants us to know there's a way to transform them into a cuddly puppy.
Next year, just say no to an electronic Christmas, she says, and you can reclaim our collective humanity. She says this in her new book, "Against the Machine," which is subtitled "The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art and Individual Lives."
Meeting the challenge, she acknowledges, will not be easy. We've been mainlining extraneous technology so long we think we can't open the cat-food can if the electricity's off. We spend 10 minutes microwaving four separate cups of coffee rather than spend four minutes heating the same amount in a pan on the stove. We've got so many friends on speed dial we've forgotten their phone numbers. This is progress?
"Well, it was supposed to be," she says, plucking lint from the folds of her navy blue wool dress. "But we kept being seduced by what technology could do for us and ignoring what was being lost in the process. Progress wasn't supposed to cost us anything we value."
From beeping cell phones at the "Messiah" singalong to hip-hop elevator carols, it's easy to make a list of the cultural lumps of coal that modern life has left in our Christmas stocking. But less immediately obvious, Fox says, are the absences -- the spiritual and aesthetic values we've allowed to slip away almost unnoticed in our collective embrace of machinery from the steam engine to the Palm Pilot.
Fox is not exactly a Luddite, but she's probably an unindicted co-conspirator. She lives on an island near Southwest Harbor, Maine, refuses to have an answering machine or a cell phone and says she brings her black-and-white TV out of the closet only for major events. Her rabbit-ears antenna pulls in only two snowy channels.
She concedes to a computer as a reality of the digital publishing age, but says she prefers to compose her books in longhand so her fingers can't outrun her thoughts.
That may seem a far cry from the followers of the apocryphal Ned Ludd, who smashed mechanical looms in the British Midlands between 1811 and 1816 to protest the seismic changes wrought on weavers and their communities by the Industrial Revolution. But she says the violence of the Luddites was far from a measure of their cause. What they were protesting, she says, was not so much the onset of machine-made cloth as the erosion of their creative birthright as human beings: "Not . . . the loss of jobs, but . . . the loss of a way of life." And though the Luddite movement was quickly and rather brutally put down, its spirit lives on in those of us who despair of ever learning to program our VCRs.
"We tend to see winning and losing in this country in absolute terms," Fox says. "As if when someone fails to triumph in an election or a cultural movement they just disappear. But, of course, they don't disappear. Sometimes they're converted to the winning side, but often they live on unpersuaded, continuing to believe in and contribute their point of view."
What her book documents, to an extent that surprised even her, is how persistent and pervasive the Luddite spirit has remained in Western culture, casting a shadow that stretches from Wordsworth and the Romantic poets through the agrarian literary movement of the Depression-era American South to the back-to-the-land communes of the 1960s.
Sometimes the spirit is expressed in nostalgia for a simpler time, as in Wordsworth's verse. Sometimes it "rages against the machine," as in the poetry of William Blake and the novels of D.H. Lawrence. And sometimes it triggers the establishment of alternative living experiments, as with people sharing the ideas of Emerson and the transcendentalists, or a whole school of aesthetics, as in the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement of John Ruskin and William Morris.
But it's always there, Fox says, and it's there because "what it represents is not just a rejection of the mechanical in life, but a reaffirmation of what it means to be human. We have been on this Earth for thousands of years. We've been mechanized for less than 200. Obviously we don't owe our survival as a species to technology. It is the qualities of imagination, and creativity, and our shared humanity that have kept us from extinction. And those are the qualities we hunger for today."
So what are we supposed to do? Throw out the stereo and the Cuisinart, sell the cars and computers, and set up housekeeping in a yurt?
We might end up happier if we did, Fox says, but that's not what she's advocating.
First of all, she says, we shouldn't be surprised at or feel guilty about the seductive power of technology. Its hold on us is not simply the illusion of saved labor or expanded leisure. Its real hold, she says, is the primal one of sorcery and myth.
"Look at the TV channel changer," Fox says. "We push a button and images appear and disappear. What is that but witchcraft? . . . Look at the television itself: It's the tribal storyteller. It's the campfire we sit around to hear the stories. It's even a deity. We speak of religion and wisdom as the appearance of light, and television tells its stories and even sells its products with beams of light. There's something really primal about our attraction to it, and we should acknowledge that."
At the same time, she says, we need to understand how much television and its sibling technologies have separated us from what's real. And then all we really have to do, she says, is "decide to take control of our lives again."
It can start in small, even tiny, ways:
Fox is wedded to her morning cup of fresh-ground coffee but gradually realized that the shriek of her electric coffee grinder was setting her teeth on edge and costing her more in stress than the pleasure of the coffee was relieving. She junked the electric grinder for a hand grinder she bought from a mail-order store that caters to the Amish and discovered that her mornings had been transformed out of all proportion to the change.
"I realized the noise of the coffee grinder had been bugging me for years and I didn't even realize it. Now there's a kind of peacefulness about my mornings I wouldn't trade for anything. And I get a curious satisfaction out of grinding the coffee beans by hand."
Not everyone, she realizes, cares that much about coffee grinder noise or even has a grinder. "But all of us have something . . . that we consider a necessary irritant in our life. And it's probably not really necessary. It may even be keeping us from discovering the pleasure in simple things."
When her clothes dryer broke some time ago, she says, she decided to dry her clothes outside on a line the way her mother used to. "I discovered that the trip outside to the clothesline forced me to interact with the day in a new way. I became conscious of the sun and wind and weather differently. I heard the birds. Now I hang clothes outside every day, even in the Maine winter. Believe it or not, it's therapeutic."
Fox realizes that questioning something as fundamental as a clothes dryer will sound weird to most people. She also knows what works for her won't work for everyone. Her kids are grown, and she lives alone. Her sister, she says, has lots of young kids and genuinely needs the time and energy her clothes dryer saves. "But she and her husband have locked their TV in the closet. Now their children read everything in sight."
The key, she says, is figuring out which machines help you live life in a more human way, in harmony with the world around us. And which we've allowed to rob us of that humanity and intrude on that harmony.
William Morris, the 19th-century designer best remembered for the Morris chair, came up with a series of rules for living with machines without becoming a machine oneself.
"He said if you were a potter making a bowl," Fox says, "it made sense to use a tool or a machine to scrape the bottom of the bowl because that was just boring work and drudgery: It had nothing to do with the shape or design of the bowl, which was a product of human imagination and creativity. On the other hand, if you run a machine that stamps out identical bowls one after the other, you've given over your humanity to that technology. And we do that all the time."
Fox grew up in Staunton, Va., and spent a lot of time during the 1950s at her grandparents' rural home in the Shenandoah Valley. There she learned the pleasures of country life that she sought to recapture in Maine after an urban adulthood and a broken marriage.
"My mother and grandmother and I used to wash the dishes together in the kitchen, and we had a lot of really good conversations in the process. They passed along stories and lessons about life. . . . I found ways to ask questions there I might have hesitated to ask in other settings. Washing dishes wasn't just washing dishes. It was a kind of event."
Then along came electric dishwashers. The dishwasher, she says, is "a perfect example of the wrong kind of technology. It leaves you with the non-creative work, the drudgery, which is scraping the plates and loading and unloading them. And it robs you of the only interesting aspect of dishwashing, which is how to get off that piece of cheese that's stuck to the plate. And it removes the opportunity for the kind of shared family task and conversation that dishwashing used to be."
However that may sound, Fox is not trying to romanticize dishwashing. She realizes there are times when there are piles of dishes and too little time and the dishwasher can be a big help. But what she wants us to understand, she says, is "that it's up to us how we use it. If we want to just let it sit there and make dishwashing into a family event occasionally, we can do that. That's our choice. And it might do more for parent-child relationships than turning on the machine and using the time it saves to prop ourselves mutely in front of the television."
We can take steps like that every day, she says: steps to increase the interaction within our families and our communities and between ourselves and our natural environment. We can stop buying our children toys that make noises and rob the children of the pleasure and the imagination of making the noises themselves. We can stop trying to stimulate our children with electronic toys and realize the most stimulating thing we can give them is a story we read or a walk we take with them or an hour we spend with them just listening to what they have to say.
"There's obviously a lot of stress in the way most of us live, and it's getting worse," she says. "People think they can't live without three cars, two jobs and an hour-and-a-half commute in stop-and-go traffic. We spend most of our waking hours watching television that isn't even real entertainment but just people screaming at us to buy more things. We literally spend more time charging the batteries of our cell phones and computers than we do talking to our children. And guilt about that drives us to spend ourselves into more debt buying the kids things they don't need but we're convinced they must have.
"And yet all we really want is what the Luddites wanted. We want to control our own lives. And we can."

Donald b. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture.  Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.  ISBN 080186772
Page 19
The technological age has brought the World Wide Web and high-speed travel, multiplying the number of possible ties individuals might have around the globe.  But in other ways modernization is also a process of separation that pulls things apart and partitions whole systems - psychological, social, and organizational—into smaller parts in the name of efficiency.  Many of the social bonds of modern life are abstract, rational, complex, and detached from a particular social context.  The fragmentation of modern life is often experienced on the personal level as alienation when ties with meaning, work, and place evaporate.  Modernization often segments social relationships and activities.  Working in a factory instead of at home, going away to college, and moving to a retirement center break up family units and separate members.  Living in one city, commuting to work in another, and vacationing in a third separates family, work, and play.  This pervasive process of separation threatens to rupture the traditional ties of close-knit communities.
The process of modernization also pulls people and things out of their social context.  In a small village everyone knows almost everything about everyone else.  Modernity decontextualizes.  A photograph pulls people out of context.  In a telephone conversation, especially with a cell phone, it’s impossible to know the social context of the other person.  Television portrays floating images without context.  Virtual reality on the World Wide Web literally has no context.  On the Internet, lovers are unhitched from social reality.  When things are taken out of context, we lose perspective, meaning, and clarity.
Page 325
Here we have a social system without poverty.  Widows, orphans, and the destitute are cared for by the church.  The Amish are rarely imprisoned.  Here is a society virtually free of crime and violence.  Some youth are occasionally arrested for drunken driving, and children are occasionally paddled, but incidents of violent crime and murder are conspicuously absent.  Amish suicide and mental illness rates are substantially lower than those in a the larger society.  Alcohol abuse, present among some youth, is practically nil among adults.  Divorce is unheard of.  Individuals are not warehoused in bureaucratic institutions -- large schools, massive factories, retirement homes, or psychiatric hospitals—but are cared for within the family.
Moreover, the generous resources of social capital in Amish society lower the transaction costs—the need for insurance, formal agreements, litigation, legal costs, and third party brokers.  Many of the routine exchanges in Amish society are lubricated with trust and integrity, which reduces the economic cost of transactions.  Recycling goods, frugal management, a thrifty lifestyle, and a rejection of consumerism produce scant waste.  Energy consumption per capita is remarkably low.  Beyond exhaust fumes from diesel power plants and water contamination by manure runoff, the Amish add little to environmental pollution.  Personal alienation, loneliness and meaninglessness are for the most part absent.  There are, of course, some unhappy marriages, lonely people, obstinate bishops, cantankerous personalities, and family feuds.  But all things considered, the quality-of-life indicators for Amish society as a whole are remarkably robust.  The Amish have, indeed, created a humane social system that attends to individual need and generates strong levels of satisfaction.

Callicot, Baird, J.  Earth’s Insights:  A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback.  California:  1994, ISBN 0520085590, Page 70

Imagine cooking a stew.  The Western concept of order is like preparing it from a recipe.  A certain Stew-universal or Form—let’s say Hungarian goulash calls for such and such ingredients, in measured proportions, cooked at a set temperature, for just so long.  One draws up a grocery list and goes to the supermarket and buys the ingredients.  Finally, one assembles the ingredients according to the specifications of the recipe.

The Chinese concept of order is rather like cooking a stew in the following way.  One collects seasonally available vegetables and herbs and perhaps a little fresh local seafood—the catch of the day.  One begins not with a recipe but with the particulars that happen to be at hand, considering not only their generic characteristics but the idiosyncrasies of each.  Perhaps the carrot is a bit overgrown—tough but tasty; the bok choy, inadvertently left out of yesterday’s stir-fry, a bit wilted; the potatoes new and very crisp, and so on.  One cuts, boils, and tries; one  decides to add a little of this and more of that; one turns up the flame a little and then, finding it too high,

turns it down—until the blend is just right.  If it is done well, the flavor of each of the components is present in its insistent particularity, but complemented—and complimented—by all the others.  Each ingredient is enhanced by virtue of its relationship to the others.  The whole is a harmony, not just an aggregate.  (I owe this analogy to Roger T. Ames, personal communication.)

Pacific Miracles
April 21, 2007 Editorial    New York Times

The trouble with modernity is how efficiently it obliterates the troves of age-old knowledge otherwise known as wisdom. The good news from Palau, a Pacific island nation near the Philippines, is that some wise old ways have reasserted themselves to the great benefit of that tiny republic’s fish and reefs, and the people who depend on them.

Under an ancient system of laws known throughout the South Pacific as tabu or kapu, rulers would forbid fishing in certain areas to let them recover from overuse. Their decisions relied on deep knowledge of seasons and of the habits of fish and plants, and were strictly obeyed by islanders, who understood that depletion of fisheries meant death.

Overfishing by local fishermen, commercial boats and poachers using dynamite has been as much a problem in Palau as elsewhere in the Pacific. Then elders in Ngiwal, a state of Palau, banned fishing on a small section of reef in 1994. It took only a few years for fish to return. Palau now protects 460 square miles of reefs and lagoons, and its reputation for recreational diving is unmatched.

In 2005, Palau’s president, Tommy Remengesau Jr., issued the “Micronesian challenge,” calling on the region to conserve 30 percent of coastal waters and 20 percent of land by 2020. Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have created hundreds of “no take” zones. Meanwhile, nations in another sea are pursuing their own “Caribbean challenge.”

The trend is encouraging, but there is still a lot of water to cover. It would help if the United States dove in. Hawaii’s reefs and inshore waters are increasingly barren, depleted by pollution, invasive species and fishermen using things like brutally efficient gill nets to catch vast amounts of fish.
Hawaii’s House of Representatives, pushed by the commercial fishing industry, recently passed a deplorable “Right to Fish” bill that is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of Palau. It erects impossible barriers against the creation of no-take zones. It would stamp out the small but growing efforts of local communities and conservation groups to adopt their own sensible fishing restrictions.

Native Hawaiians know all about kapu. What the lobbyists pushing the legislation are banking on is that Hawaiians will forget the usefulness of the old ways and bristle at the supposed paternalism. It would be a perverse victory for “rights” if such an attitude hastened the demise of a shared, precious and vulnerable resource like an island fishery.

Quick - hit the ‘breaks’   In a mad-dash 24/7 world, a few people are resisting the rush, moving slowly amid the rat race By Marilyn Gardner, from the July 06, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0706/p17s01-bogn.html
Life-changing experiences take many forms. For Carl Honoré, a Canadian journalist, the moment of truth came when he read an article about “One-Minute Bedtime Stories.” Weary of nightly struggles with his 2-year-old son, who loved long stories told slowly, his heart leapt. At last! A way to shave precious minutes off parental bedtime duty!
But reason quickly prevailed. Honoré realized that his whole life was “an exercise in hurry.” He had become “Scrooge with a stopwatch, obsessed with saving every last scrap of time, a minute here, a few seconds there.” There must be a better way to live, he reasoned. But how?
A self-described “speedaholic,” Honoré packed his bags and began racking up thousands of frequent-flier miles, studying the prospects for slowing down in a world obsessed with going fast. Beginning with an Italian-born movement called Slow Food, based on the premise that cooking and eating should be leisurely, Honoré found groups and individuals trying to regain a sense of well-being and pleasure.
Out of that mission came his engaging new book, “In Praise of Slowness,” which delivers an urgent message: Slow down and enjoy life.
In America’s 24/7 culture the pace has become so intense, Honoré charges, that we have forgotten how to enjoy the moment. In restaurants, we pay the bill and order a taxi while eating dessert. We sleep too little and work too long, hardly daring to take time off. (“Vacationitis,” he calls it.) We overprogram our children, creating stress in those as young as 5.
The solution:  Balance - the heart of the Slow movement’s philosophy.
In his appealing first-person approach, Honoré offers a you-are-there view of global efforts to challenge the “false god” of speed. Everywhere, he sees evidence of “a great hunger for slowness:” The popularity of gardening, book clubs, and knitting reflects a longing for a more relaxed pace.
In England, he spends a day at a Speed Awareness Program - penance for a speeding ticket - learning, not always successfully, how to tame a heavy accelerator foot. He retreats to rural Wiltshire for three days of meditation. He and his wife even enroll in a class on Slow Sex.
In Italy, Honoré enjoys a four-hour Slow Food dinner. In Germany, he hears a group called Tempo Giusto play Mozart and others more slowly. And in Japan, he visits a school called Apple Time, founded by desperate parents as a “slow school” alternative to high-stress classes.
In his zeal to include every example he can find, Honoré occasionally risks overstating his case. He breathlessly calls SuperSlow “the weightlifting movement sweeping North America and beyond.” Sweeping?
For all its benefits, living Slow remains a luxury unavailable to many. Four-hour dinners are expensive, as are alternative schools. And middle-class workers often can’t afford to cut their hours to enjoy more time at home. Yet such quibbles do not detract from Honoré’s provocative message.
In a fast-lane culture where efficiency is king, he insists that devotees of Slow are not Luddites. Nor are they backward or technophobic. Slow and Fast do not have to represent an either-or choice. Who wants to give up jet travel or the Internet?
Ever the realist, Honoré cautions that decelerating “will be a struggle until we rewrite the rules that govern almost every sphere of life - the economy, the workplace, urban design, education, medicine. This will take a canny mix of gentle persuasion, visionary leadership, tough legislation, and international consensus.”
The most important question, Honoré says, comes down to this:
“What is life for?” Making a persuasive case for balance, he adds, “To let work take over our lives is folly. There are too many important things that need time, such as friends, hobbies, and rest.” That also includes the children like his son who hunger at bedtime for “just one more story” - preferably a long one.
Marilyn Gardner writes about family issues for the Monitor.

Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed, HarperCollins: New York, 2004.  ISBN 006054578X.

Page 21

Survival was one incentive for measuring time.  Ancient civilizations used calendars to work out when to plant and harvest crops.  Right from the start, though, timekeeping proved to be a double-edged sword.  On the upside, scheduling can make anyone, from peasant farmer to software engineer, more efficient.  Yet as soon as we start to parcel up time, the tables turn, and time takes over.  We become slaves to the schedule.  Schedules give us deadlines, and deadlines, by their very nature, give us a reason to rush.  As the Italian proverb puts it: Man measures time, and time measures man.  By making daily schedules possible, clocks held out the promise of greater efficiency – and also tighter control.

Page 24

In 1748, at the dawn of the industrial era, Benjamin Franklin blessed the marriage between profit and haste with an aphorism that still trips off the tongue today: Time is money.  Nothing reflected, or reinforced, the new mindset more than the shift towards paying workers by the hour, instead of for what they produced.   Once every minute cost money, business found itself locked in a never-ending race to accelerate output.  More widgets per hour equaled more profit.  Staying ahead of the pack meant installing the latest time-saving technology before your rivals did.  Modern capitalism came with a built-in imperative to upgrade, to accelerate, to become ever more efficient.

Page 217

During the early part of the Industrial Revolution, the masses worked too hard, or were too poor, to make the most of what free time they had.  But as incomes rose, and working hours fell, a leisure culture began to emerge.  Like work, leisure became formalized.  Many of the things with which we fill our spare time today came into being in the nineteenth century.  Football, rugby, hockey and baseball turned into spectator sports.  Cities built parks for the public to stroll and picnic in.  Better printing presses, coupled with rising literacy, fuelled an explosion in reading.

Even as leisure spread, people debated its purpose.  Many Victorians saw it chiefly as an escape from work, or as a means to working better.  But others went further, suggesting that what we do with our free time gives texture, shape and meaning to our lives.  “It is in his pleasure that a man really lives,” said Agnes Repplier, an American essayist.  “It is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.”  Plato believed that the highest form of leisure was to be still and rece3ptive to the world, a view echoed by modern intellectuals.  Franz Kafka put it this way:  “You don’t need to leave your room. Remain seated at your table and listen.  Don’t even listen, simply wait.  Don’t even wait, be quite still and solitary.  The world will freely offer itself to you to be unasked.  It has no choice.  It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Page 220

Bernadette Murphy, a forty-year-old writer based in Los Angeles, caught the mood with her 2002 book, Zen and the Art of Knitting.  She sees the return to needles and yarn as a part of a wider backlash against the superficiality of modern life.  “There is a great hunger in our culture right now for meaning, for things that really nurture the soul,” she says.  “Knitting is one way of taking tie to appreciate life, to find meaning and make those connections.”

Page 221

Knitting by nature is Slow.  You cannot push a button, turn a dial of flick a switch to knit more quickly.  The real joy of knitting lies in the doing , rather than in reaching the finish line.  Studies show that the rhythmic, repetitive dance of the needles can lower heart rate and blood pressure, lulling the knitter into a peaceful, almost meditative state.  “The best thing about knitting is its slowness,” says Murphy.  “It is so slow that we see the beauty inherent in every tiny act that makes up a sweater.  So slow that we know the project is not going to get finished today – it may not get finished for many months or longer – and that allows us to make our peace with the unresolved nature of life.  We slow down as we knit.”

Page 222

In almost every culture, the garden is a sanctuary, a place to rest and ruminate.  Niwa, the Japanese word for garden, means “an enclosure purified for the worship of the gods.”  The act of gardening itself – planting, pruning, weeding, watering, waiting for things to grow – can help us slow down.  Gardening does not lend itself to acceleration any more than knitting does.  Even with a greenhouse, you cannot make plants bloom on demand or bend the seasons to suit your schedule.  Nature has its own timetable.  In a hurry-up world, where everything is scheduled for maximum efficiency, surrendering to the rhythms of nature can be therapeutic.

Page 226

Like knitting and gardening, the act of sitting down and surrendering to a piece of writing to size the cult of speed.  In the words of Paul Virilio, a French philosopher, “Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing down that destroys the mass’s dynamic efficiency."  Even when overall book sales are stagnant or falling, many people, particularly educated urbanites, are saying to hell with dynamic efficiency and curling up with a good book.  It is even possible to talk of a reading Renaissance.

Kitchen Stories Movie Review:


Kitchen Stories is a quirky Norse/Swedish co-production that functions equally effectively as a critique of common sociological methods of observation, a male bonding movie, and a satire of certain aspects of the countries where it transpires. The film, which takes place during the 1950s, introduces a Swedish scientist, Folke (Tomas Norström), who travels to Norway to observe how a volunteer, Isak (Joachim Calmeyer), functions in his kitchen. It is Folke’s job to map Isak’s every movement in the kitchen so the results can be used to determine how to engineer a kitchen to best meet a single man’s needs. (Similar studies really took place in Sweden and the United States during the 1950s, albeit with married women.)
Before beginning his work, Folke is given strict instructions not to interact with Isak. He is to sit in a high chair (one that looks a little like a lifeguard’s perch) in a corner of the kitchen and watch. The theory is that Isak will go about his business as usual, oblivious to Folke’s presence. The reality is that the presence of an observer - even a silent one - influences Isak’s every action. This raises questions about how legitimate any study can be that relies upon supposedly impartial observation. Not only is it impossible for a human observer to be objective about a subject, but the subject will almost always act differently. (One has to wonder about the “honesty” of people who set up webcams in their houses with the objective of showing how they live to anyone who discovers the URL. Do they really go about their business as usual, or do they “perform” for their audience? And, after a camera has been around for a long time, is it possible that what we’re seeing is no longer influenced by an exhibitionist, self-conscious awareness of being watched?)
As one might readily anticipate from a movie of this sort, Folke and Isak, both of whom are loners, develop a friendship. It begins with a few innocuous questions and ends with Folke buying Isak a birthday cake and Isak letting Folke listen to the chatter of radio station broadcasts that can be heard coming through the silver fillings in his mouth. There are other characters in the movie, but they fill minor roles, adding a little color. For the most part, director Bent Hamer is interested in Folke and Isak. The nature of their interaction will be familiar to those who have seen any of the countless male bonding pictures available in video stores, although the acting and writing are of a higher caliber than that which one typically discovers in Hollywood fare.
One aspect of the film which will likely be lost to North American viewers is Hamer’s tongue-in-cheek view of Swedish and Norse stereotypes, and the way he satirizes the mutual antagonism between the countries. The Swedes are portrayed as cold, uptight individuals who rely on science and technology, while the Norse are depicted as somewhat backward, folksy people. One element that typifies their differences is the side of the road on which they drive - during the ‘50s, the Norse stayed to the right, while the Swedes took the left (scientifically proven, a character asserts, to be the safer side).
I’m tempted to describe Kitchen Stories as an inconsequential film, but that sounds a little too like a pejorative. Rather, let me say that it’s a simple story told well, with plenty of lighthearted moments and kernels of thought-provoking material, but little to really excite the cinematic appetite. In some ways, the central relationship between Folke and Isak, despite being the most emotionally satisfying aspect of the film, is the least interesting. Kitchen Stories is not the kind of motion picture that will receive widespread distribution, nor will it draw significant crowds. But most who see it will come away with a positive impression.
Rating: *** out of ****

Marks, Alexandra, “How drinking harms on-the-job efficiency.” Christian Science Monitor, 12/23/98, Vol. 91 Issue 20, p2

NEW YORK….For the first time, researchers have documented that it is these social drinkers - not the hard-core alcoholics or problem drinkers - who are responsible for most of the estimated $67 billion worth of lost productivity that’s attributed each year to alcohol-related problems. The implications are expected to transform corporate drinking policies across the country. Most now focus strictly on people with serious alcohol problems. As a result of this study, researchers say, they should start educating every worker about the negative “stealth effects” of even low levels of drinking at work, and any heavy drinking off the job.

Conducted over four years at seven Fortune 500 companies by JSI and researchers from the Harvard and Boston University Schools of Health, the study also found that 80 percent of the drinking that took place during the workday, took place at lunch. The study found that even a glass of wine or a beer with a burger impaired worker productivity.
Counter to popular wisdom, the study also found that it was managers, not hourly employees, who were most often drinking during the workday.  Twenty-three percent of upper managers and 11 percent of first-line supervisors said they had a drink during the workday, compared with only 8 percent of hourly employees.

Be You Drunken! Baudelaire, 1869

One must always be drunk. That’s all there is to it; that’s the only solution. In order not to feel the horrible burden of  Time breaking your shoulders and bowing your head to the ground, you must be drunken without respite.
But; with what?  With wine, poetry or virtue, as you will. Be you drunken.
And if sometimes you awake, on the steps of a palace in the green herbage of a ditch or in the dreary solitude of your room, then ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds the clocks, ask everything that runs, that moans that moves on wheels, everything that sings and speaks—ask them what is the time of day; and the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds and the clocks will answer you: It is time to get drunk. In order not to be the martyred slave of Time, be you drunken; Be you drunken ceaselessly! With wine, poetry or virtue, as you will!

Vienne, Veronique.  The Art of Doing Nothing.  New York: 1998.  ISBN 0609600745, Page 73