Blowhard, Esq. writes:

During this year’s Super Bowl, only one ad caught my attention. Take a look:

Virginia Postrel defines glamour as any calculated, carefully polished image designed to impress and persuade. Some of its key qualities are a sense of the mysterious and transcendent. At first blush it might seem silly that a job like farming can be glamourous, but I think this ad is quite effective at doing just that. The stentorian narration by Paul Harvey is in full preacher mode, describing God’s thought process no less. The text is alliterative and poetic — “shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire” — as it describes acts that sound less like chores and more like enchantments.

On the other hand, Postrel points out that glamour also conceals and deceives. As impressed as I was by the ad, I couldn’t help but suppress an eye roll after watching it. I mean, the vast majority of our farming is done by Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, not good ol’ Bill who gets up at 4am and works 16 hour days during harvest time so he can sell his wares at the local general store.

On the other other hand (so I guess we’re back to the original hand), why shouldn’t farmers be turned into heroes? Is the American food renaissance of the past couple of decades imaginable without farmers’ markets? It’s almost common now for better restaurants to proudly tout their support of local providers. Here’s part of the menu from a happening Newport Beach bistro near me. Notice how the description of the pork chop mentions the farm by name.

And now the magazine world seems to be doing its part. I was at Barnes & Noble recently and their featured rack was full of new issues of this:

Here’s an interview with the editor, Ann Marie Gardener, in which she explains the allure of farming:

There is a romance to the landscape that’s undeniable, and there is a strange appeal to physical hard work. When you’ve been working all day, you go to bed and you’re actually tired. There’s a level of feeling good you can’t really interpret, it’s not like shopping. I don’t want to speak for a culture, but I think people crave nature, and crave a connection to it, and when you’re detached from it, there’s sort of an ennui that you don’t get in the country, and you don’t get when you’re growing things. When you grow something or learn something, there’s this feeling of incredible…I don’t know if it’s pride, but it’s control.

And I also think it’s just the time we live in, a culmination of climate change, the land grab situation, the growing population, and I don’t know if it’s related to Occupy Wall Street and the banking collapse, but I think it all plays into it. It’s not one thing, but a culmination of all these things that are happening at the same time. It’s just the perfect time for us to be launching.

Foodies rejecting processed industrial food, Paleos looking for healthier meats and vegetables, the potential collapse of the world economy, dissatisfaction with the sedentary nature of office-based work, the DIY/Make movement — all of these different strands and subcultures can point to the farmer as a hero or model.

More

• Modern Farmer is based in Hudson, NY. Its website is here.
• Via BoingBoing, I just learned about The New Farmers Almanac. Intended for “young farmers who intend to build a new food system, one farm at a time” the editor-in-chief pledges, “With this almanac, we assert our voices as new agrarians. No matter what the weather holds, we seek life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and farming is the way to get there.”
• Click here to find a farmers’ market near you.
• Chicken diapers.
• Does anyone under 30 even know who Paul Harvey was? I used to listen to The Rest of the Story and his News and Comment all the time. ADM was one of his major sponsors.
• Postrel’s The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion goes on sale in early November.