The squizzle in the banner in some browser appears to be gone. At least in IE, the banner also seems to have any annoying tendency now to disappear entirely. I will work on more general template repair when I am back from my conference.
Non sequitur: There is not a single Whole Foods in the entire state of Iowa. By contrast, two of the three grocery stores closest to where I live are Whole Foods. I believe that some larger social observation could be drawn from that, but I need to get back to my paper.
3 Comments
Larger social observation: Iowa people are poorer than those who live in the suburbs of Chicago. There are also less of them.
Smaller social observation: your life now is different than your life 15 years ago. But your family still seem to like you. So this is nothing to worry about…
Iowa people have gardens where they pick even fresher food than Whole Foods.
And Whole Foods stock just crashed today - 13.76% down.
Not really. I guess a fair number of the rural folks do, but there are tons of rural houses surrounded by miles of spectacular soil that don’t grow anything non-commercial but grass.
We do have farmers’ markets, but they’re not an exact substitute for a Whole Foods type store. I think Shakha’s got a lot of it - much of Iowa isn’t really that densely populated, and the populace is poorer. Nebraska, which is basically the same damn state only worse, has only one - in Omaha. But I also suspect there’s something cultural to it, because a) we Iowans don’t eat that fancy food, y’all and b) the perception is that we have lots of locally grown fresh food, as sociosam said. Iowa is about 99% corn, soybeans and pigs, though. I grew up here, and I think I probably went about 15 years without eating anything Iowa grown other than pork and sweet corn.
I am endlessly fascinated by people’s perceptions of Iowa. Best exhibit ever at the Iowa Science Center was a series of taped interviews with Easterners talking about Iowa.