are working harder for less.’10
Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman, philosopher, and – as one might now call him – futurist, was ahead of his time when he wrote in 1757, ‘The great error of our nature is not to know where to stop; not to be satisfied with any reasonable requirement . . . but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit of more.’ It is this ‘insatiable pursuit of more’ that we must now address. Adam Smith remarked that Burke was ‘The only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do.’11 They both wanted to create a better society through competition but with a healthy balance between pursuit of self-interest and pursuit of the greater good. Over two centuries later, their vision might be taking shape.
We may be coming out of the consumer trance we have been living in for the past fifty or so years. At the heart of this transformation are two interlocking phenomena. The first is a values shift. There is a growing consumer consciousness that infinite growth and consumption based on finite resources are not a viable combination. Consequently, we are finding ways to get more out of what we buy, and more importantly, out of what we don’t buy. At the same time, we are starting to recognize that the constant quest for material things has come at the expense of impoverishing relationships with friends, family, neighbours and the planet. This realization is causing a desire to re-create stronger communities. We are experiencing a tipping point from the pursuit of ‘what’s in it for me?’ towards the mind-set of ‘what’s in it for us?’ But more than that, we are beginning to see that self-interest and collective good depend on each other. It is in my self-interest to stop global warming; it is in my self-interest to participate in elections; it is in my interest to correct an online entry on Wikipedia.
Reclaiming Old Virtues
Our awareness of the false promises of our consumer economy is not new. Just as mass consumerism was taking hold, a visionary tried to halt the emerging culture of materialism. Cereal giant Kellogg Company founder W. K. Kellogg decided in 1930, right around the start of the Great Depression, that most of his fifteen hundred employees would go from a traditional eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown championed the initiative, announcing at the time, ‘Four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.’12 The existing workforce took a slight pay cut, but Kellogg raised the hourly rate to offset the loss and promised production bonuses to encourage people to work hard.
But Kellogg wanted to do more than provide and save jobs. He recognized that rather than passing time, like previous generations, people were spending it, getting lost in the ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. This mania was leaving them disconnected from their communities. Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day that Brown and Kellogg hoped to show that the ‘Free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.’13 It was a bold vision, and it worked – for a while.
The workers in Battle Creek embraced the extra two hours. Beyond the time spent at home with their family and friends, the time also created a sense of freedom to pursue leisure interests. Women sewed, gardened, visited neighbours and cooked together. Men exercised, hunted, visited libraries and explored other hobbies. As Hunnicutt writes, ‘Those extra two hours were precious and offered an opportunity to craft the employee’s sense of family, community, and citizenship. . . . The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together.’14
Kellogg’s six-hour workday produced not just a qualitative social benefit by creating ‘happier’ employees with more leisure time. There were quantitative results for the company, too. The shorter workday influenced employees to work harder. On average, ninety-six boxes of shredded wholewheat biscuits were packed per hour instead of eighty-three.15 Overhead costs, labour costs and the number of work-related accidents also decreased. The company polled workers in 1946 (after the programme had been temporarily suspended) and found that 77 percent of men and 87 percent of women would choose a thirty-hour week even if it meant lower wages.16
Despite its success and popularity, Kellogg stopped its experiment in 1943. The labour shortage and product demand from World War II pushed the company back to an eight-hour workday. President Roosevelt launched a series of policy initiatives that led to the standard forty-hour working week that for the large part we still adhere to today. These political forces were impossible for even Kellogg to resist. As one employee later commented, ‘Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.’17
Today there is a conscious movement to return to the same intentions that motivated the six-hour Kellogg working week. Across America, and much of Europe and Australasia, we are seeing a drive to reclaim leisure time to self-educate, self-relate and revive neglected forms of social capital. The urge to regain meaning and community in our lives is popping up everywhere – and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in our kitchens. Roo used to visit his Grandma Dada in her middle-class home in Wimbledon every Saturday. When Roo walked in the door, he would run to the fridge. Everything you needed to know about Dada could be understood in the way she cooked. She had a routine. The first Saturday would be a roast chicken, the leftover bones would be turned into stock for the following Saturday’s risotto, the leftover risotto would be used for the following Saturday’s stuffed tomatoes, and the leftover stuffed tomatoes would be turned into pasta sauce. Roo and his brothers would joke that when there was something that she couldn’t reuse she’d turn it into the soap she made them wash their hands with. There is more to this process than resourcefulness. For Dada, making lunch was about finding balance through a value system that integrated her history, as well as her sense of responsibility to her family and community. Roo thought of his grandmother in June 2009 when he, his wife and their fourteen-month-old daughter took a trip to China to visit distant relatives. They stayed on the fifty-seventh floor of the JW Marriott in Shanghai. As they walked around the breakfast buffet, he was struck with an intense feeling that what lay before him wasn’t rational. Smoked salmon from Scotland, lobster from Maine, French croissants, Italian spring water and Costa Rican coffee. The sense of globalized freedom that the buffet offered felt overwhelming and oppressive. But most of all, the choices were without meaning. He was in Shanghai, and he wanted a Chinese breakfast and something that made him feel his fourteen-hour flight had transported him somewhere new. And here is where his grandmother’s old world and his own new world values meet, in the desire to find purpose and an authentic story behind what we buy, make, do and create.
Return of the Local Marketplace
In high school, Rob Kalin would skip classes to shoot and develop his photographs. He graduated with a D-minus average but won admission to a studio programme at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Over the next six years, Kalin attended half a dozen colleges before finally finishing his degree, with a major in classics, from New York University in 2004. He was twenty-five years old at the time and pessimistic about how his degree would help him in the job market. The son of a carpenter, he grew up with a ‘hands-on’ approach to life. He started to make furniture in his Brooklyn apartment, turning IKEA kitchen work surfaces into stereo speakers and reclaimed wood into desks. But Kalin discovered it was hard to sell his stuff, even online. There was a lot of ‘advice and hand-holding’ for artisans but no viable marketplace to exhibit and sell their creations. At the same time, he was not a fan of brick-and-mortar chain stores. He would just walk around and see shelves upon shelves of ‘anonymous mass-produced products’ – and think that he wanted to create the opposite experience.
In early April the following year, Kalin was sitting in a big orange chair facing his apartment window. He started to sketch the initial ideas for his vision – a vibrant community of people across the globe connecting
