Real Deals

"The irony, of course, is that this counter-culture stance is now the mainstream. The more people who seek fulfilment via the so-called “anti-corporate” subculture among their panoply of options (the skater-urban punk aesthetic, the $6 carton of organic milk, the political identification with the pre-modern cultural underdog), the more competitive and commercial these choices become. Thinking of adopting the 100-mile diet? There's now a 50-mile diet that creates a smaller footprint. Or, better still, spend a year eating only what you've grown in your back garden, like novelist Barbara Kingsolver or writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little House on the Prairie fame. She baked the bread, churned the butter, fed the woodstove, tended the apple orchard and raised the chickens that provided the food her family ate.
"Sound familiar? If this lifestyle sounds like a Michael Pollan-style idyll, it's also a form of slavery your ancestors worked their butts off to leave behind."

Susan Pinker in The Globe and Mail reviews Andrew Potter's The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves.