Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia

I'm on the Patagonia email list, so learned about a webcast of a talk he did with another Patagonia person at Yale (don't know how long this link will last). He's a great speaker, I heard him once on a local public access channel while catsitting for Keely and was swooning. Anyway, there were 2 nuggets, quite related. When he was a young climber he prepared for a summer in Yosemite Valley by going to a dented can store and buying cases of discount cat food. The last question was about why his stuff is so expensive, Patagonia/Patagucci, and the myth (?) that he was selling expensive stuff to rich people. His reply was essentially that you get what you pay for, that if you are poor it doesn't make sense to go to Costco and buy a 20$ blender that will break the first time you put ice in it, that it's better to save up and buy quality. I'm so tired of our disposable society. While I'm thinking about his talk, he also got on his soapbox a couple of times, and among other things he was really supportive of organic agriculture, working in the field with your hands. Just a super cool guy, and it makes me feel even better about buying his stuff, even though I only buy it on sale or off of ebay ;) Hmmm, stream of conscience writing, hopefully the point got across.  Here's an NPR interview that has alot of the same stories from the Yale talk. The organic cotton bit is great. 100% conventional cotton = 73% cotton + formaldehyde and other interesting things. They've only used organic cotton since 1986!

My latest, a Nano Storm jacket off of ebay

Organics / NPR

2 stories this week about a Stanford study about organic food (focusing on finding no difference between the nutrition of organic and conventional produce) really had me disappointed, yelling at the radio that that isn't why we we grow & buy organic food! Finally in the friday night all things considered a reporter in Portland (of course) did a piece about why people buy organics that had me nodding along. Jeez, if NPR can't cover the issue well what is the chance that more standard media outlets will -- and that people might hear something that brings them over to our side?

Update: Bittman has a bunch of links about the distortions in the Stanford study