by The Complementary Spouse and I spent the weekend helping her brother and sister-in-law out at the Mother Earth News Fair. They had a booth as she is a consultant for Usborne children’s books.
Larry and I primarily helped with the set-up and take-down while the Complementary Spouse and Jan did all the selling of books. The Fair attracts a number of families who bring their children with them as well as a significant number of grandparents looking for educational books for their grandkids.
As I noted a couple of years ago, these events are not as granola as you might expect. For every one person wearing dreadlocks you saw probably 10-20 folks with gray hair. These events attract a lot of homesteaders, preppers, farmers, and everyday folks interested in self-reliance.
Larry and I attended workshops on sausage making, whole animal butchery, “wildcrafted” cocktails, and reusing wood pallets. I also attended a workshop on charcuterie while he went to the one on bastes, rubs, and marinades for BBQ. If we had the room, I might have attended others dealing making your own wood-fired pizza oven or on keeping goats.
I did come home with an autographed copy of The Wildcrafted Cocktail and a nice bushcrafter knife from L.T. Wright Knives.
One of the criticisms of the NRA – and it is fairly valid – is that they don’t attract enough minorities and women. That said, the recent NRA Annual Meeting in Atlanta featured a much more heterogeneous mix of people than this Mother Earth News Fair. I don’t know whether it was the location, the subject matter, or the decidedly rural flavor of the fair but the attendees were almost uniformly white.
So the next time someone says the NRA is only for old white guys, I’ll respond, “Have you been to the Mother Earth News Fair?” The sad part is that both events had things of interest to all people, of all colors, and in all walks of life.