American Consumerism

Last weekend, I stopped by Sur la table in Berkeley and was entertained mightily by the various fanciful gadgets, till I saw something called "Corn De-Silking Brush".

I was speechless and then was seething with anger.   Why on earth such a tool needs to be created?  How much resources - materials, energy, human labor, etc. used to create this utterly replaceable gadget can be used for better, more urgent purposes?

Read this from another online retailer for this brush:

Corn-on-the-Cob just out of the garden is one of the sweetest treats on earth, but cleaning those cobs can be a tiresome chore. With the Clipper Mill Corn De-Silking Brush, you can take the pain out of that chore!

What can be a better example tho show that how utterly careless and thoughtless Americans collectively are and what a consumer nation we are!  When American consumerism becomes so irksome in the world, shouldn't we have some self-inspection?  When people in many countries perhaps would be happy to eat some corn "silk" to fill their bellies, we are too lazy to de-silk with our hands and someone in China many manufacture them for us. 

I often wonder what a factory worker there would think about the purpose of their products and how they'd imagine the buyers of those products.