Indoor farmer's market on 3rd and 3rd in Brooklandia
Sometimes I wonder if I live in Brooklandia, a variation on a word I’ve stolen from the funny new IFC TV show “Portlandia,” a land where everything is ultra-PC and “young people go to retire.”
I live in the East Coast version of Portland — Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the strollers come laden with air bags, and where no one is happy unless there’s a bike lane near their car. It’s kind of like an island within Brooklyn. What made me think of this is a visit I made to an indoor farmer’s market (hey, it’s cold here) where my wife began chatting up a vendor who had discovered that his calling was making a particular type of chocolate while he was practicing yoga and meditation in Thailand.
As this nice guy began telling us all the trouble he’d gone to to make this chocolate, my head went straight to the first episode of “Portlandia” where a young couple cannot order the chicken on the menu without knowing the chicken’s name and whether it has any friends. Eventually, the couple must visit the farm where the chicken was raised and talk to his captors.
I even joked with this chocolate farmer that his description of the chocolate sounded eerily like something I’d just heard in “Portlandia” and he laughed along with us. We bought a couple of bars and he casually asked us if we wanted them in one of his “cool little bags.” I said no. It’s only later that I saw this sign about those bags. I had to take this photo because I figured you all would think I was making this up. But I’m not. So here:
The only thing that saves Brooklandia from itself are the equally compelling signs on the bodegas that still exist on every corner. I spotted this one on the same walk and I know which one appeals to me. How about you? [Please follow me on twitter @paullarosa or on Facebook. Thanks.]
Speaking of Brooklandia and chicken, the ones at the Food Coop come with their feet on–when you open the packaging, the feet come popping out. Creepy. I prefer MY chicken footless.
i with you on that one ellen….susan thinks otherwise. she loves all that flah-vor!!
This reminds me of San Francisco–a little over the top with banning toys in Happy Meals, plastic bags, and enforcing the law that requires restaurants to print calorie counts in a little book and place it ever so nicely on the table next to the appetizer and dessert booklets. I just don’t want to know how many calories are in my favorite salad or in my lobster dinner or my guilty pleasure chili cheese fries!
This post was absolutely brilliant. Live in Brooklyn (from SF) and was thinking i have to be the first to come up with a simple bottle of water that just happens to be labeled gluten free, organic, from the “source”, natural vitamins and minerals, free trade, 100% from recycled product, green, earthwise, fat free, cage-free, no artificial anything…
guarantee it would sell at $5 a pop.
You my friend are a marketing genius
Pfft I’ve been drinking diet water since the early 2000s.
i always wanted to create a water company called “outback” which would bottle water that you take straight from a hose in your garden ‘outback’ …maybe it would succeed in australia!!