The story of things
“We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.”
Did you ever go shopping with your grandma?
Mine famously tried a jumper on over her t-shirt in the middle of M&S. She then accidentally took her t-shirt off with the jumper and stood there in her bra. She’s gone now, but the story lives on.
If you shopped with your grandma you might have noticed that she always looked at the label. What is it made of? How do I wash it? Where was it made? She wanted to know the story behind the jumper.
When my grandma bought milk, she bought milk. Not skimmed or semi-skimmed. Not soya, oat, rice, hemp, coconut, almond, or pea milk. But milk. The milkman delivered it and it came from the local dairy. Whoever got to the milk first would get the cream off the top and sometimes it was the blue tits.
The story behind the milk was a human one (involving cows and blue tits).
Do we need to know the story of things?
Wabi-sabi, the beauty of things impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, is now a marketable quality.
We, the consumer, long for this soulful life full of real, earthy, handmade things. But how do you know that what you are getting is the real deal? And does it matter?
Seth Godin, on seeing more and more fake wabi-sabi in the world, says this:
“As we get closer and closer to being able to simulate the work of ‘by hand’, to simulate the work of humanity, what’s going to matter for a long time to come is do we have a story about it? Do we know its origin? Did something have to happen for this to be created? Was there a struggle along the way?
Because wabi-sabi is always in the eye of the beholder. But now, now that we can simulate it, even more than that, it’s in the eye of the story holder, the storyteller, the person who knows what was involved. ”
Marketing is a world of smoke and mirrors and when it comes to shopping, we can’t always believe our eyes.
That’s why I’ve started looking into the story behind some of the things I buy and asking myself, is it a story I like and one that I want to invite into my life?
My clothes
I live on a fairly tight budget, so can be a sucker for a TK Maxx bargain. I recently bought a black sweater. It wasn’t until I got home and looked at the label that I noticed it was completely synthetic and made in China. That’s not a story I especially like. It didn’t feel nice to wear and will probably end up in a charity shop.
My wife bought me this jacket in a French workwear shop in Stockholm. I love everything about it. I’m pretty sure I’ll have it for the rest of my life. It will become old and worn and probably even more beautiful.
It’s made by Champ de Manoeuvres and this is their story: We find the best materials and assemble our clothes in French workshops on a human scale and with traditional know-how.
Ideally, I’d go one step further and buy clothes made by someone I know. Fortunately, I don’t have to go far as Yarmouth Oilskins is just up the road from me and has been there for over 100 years.
They say: we still create our collection in the same factory using traditional methods using many of our original patterns. We have a team of 20 craftspeople, many of whom have been with us for 25 years. Our traditional workwear garments, originally designed for practical use in the workplace, are still being created for the 21st century. Our fabrics are sourced in the UK, mostly from factories in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
these are stories I do like. But can I afford to buy clothes made on this human scale?
I got the jacket and sweater at roughly the same time, 5 months ago. I’ve worn the sweater once and the jacket approximately 100 times. So at a cost per wear, the jacket has already worked out to be far cheaper. By the time I’m 80, it will have been incredibly cheap!
My milk
I’ve started drinking milk. It’s almost 40 years since I drank real milk, having become a vegetarian at 17 and switching to plant milk. So what happened?
My favourite was Oatly Barista, especially in coffee, and in the beginning, they seemed to have a great story. But it turned kind of sour. Maybe they became too big, too successful, you could say. They sold part of their business to Blackstone, one of Trump’s major donors. I no longer like their story.
I now buy my milk raw from two local farms. One is a ‘calf at foot’ dairy, which means the calf stays with the mum until it weans naturally. The other is a tiny family-run farm with just a few cows. Here I can take my own glass bottles and fill them with raw milk and pay in an honesty box.
I like these stories.
I used to think that being ‘plant based’ meant living a harmless life, but now I realise it is more nuanced than that; ploughs kill small mammals all the time, and whereas an abundance of wildlife can coexist with a field of cows, wildlife becomes a problem when you are growing crops…. but this is a whole other conversation!
Beauty is in the eye of the story holder
We could argue till the cows come home about whether we should have cows, but I want to suggest another approach that’s not based on the binary of right and wrong, good or bad.
Imagine if each of us committed to considering the story behind what we buy and only bought into the stories we like,
What kind of world could we create?
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