Slow Tables

Here’s an interesting idea: furniture-maker Charles Shackleton saw how the growing localvore movement had created a desire among many to see where their food comes from. He wanted to use this interest to benefit his own business.

So he came up with the “Naked Table Project.” People who live in or were willing to travel to Vermont ordered tables, and got to meet everyone involved in the process of making them: from the loggers who cut down the maple trees to the sawmillers who processed the wood, to the carpenters who built the joints. Customers then helped assemble the tables themselves.

Obviously this isn’t for everyone, although Shackleton says the tables aren’t really all that expensive (though they seem pretty expensive to me). Not everyone has the time or the inclination. In large part, it seems like a way to get people to pay more for a product (the same thing works with pick your own - you usually pay more than the farmer would get wholesale). But it’s a neat idea.

The coolest part, I think, is that each purchaser planted a maple tree to replace the wood they used, and then, as Shackleton describes:

We took portraits of all the people with the tree they planted, and we took down the GPS coordinates of the seedlings, and put each number on the bottom of the table

So in a generation or two, whoever owns the table can go to that spot and see the grown-up tree. A cool way to connect the product to the land.