I'm a libraphile (is that the word?) and I began filling my children's shelves with books years before I had even purchased my first pregnancy test. By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can. My ideal lifestyle shines like autumn sunset on the matt label of Pepsico, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)'s Lay's new Natural line of baked chips and Cheetos (natural Cheetos?!?), it smiles on me like the friendly cows on the label of Brown Cow's Cream Top yogurts. It's in the Modena farmhouse tableau on the label of my Trader Joe's Balsamic Vinegar; in the seven-grain flower on my Kashi TLC crackers (flavor: "Country Cheddar"). Even my macaroni & cheese, the Trader Joe's brand, blares in bold child-friendly font on four of the six box sides, "Wisconsin Cheddar."

I buy it hook, line and butter churner. How can I resist? Clearly I am not able to whip up a batch of cottage cheese with milk from my family's dairy cow, nor am I ever in the presence of an actual unhusked grain of wheat. I have an old-fashioned Italian pasta maker, a rustic campfire-style coffeemaker, a copper mortar and pestle for crushing herbs: you know as well as I do that they're decor, not tools.

No, those ideals were left for my own grandmother on her dairy farm in central Oregon. Even though I know the reality is nothing like the photos and illustrations on the box, I keep buying, I keep pretending that my life is so much more bucolic than it is.

The next best thing to doing it yourself? Letting marketers make you believe that, by eating their chips, cheeses and things baked by giant machines in a factory in Pennsylvania somewhere, that you're leaning really, really close to that old cast-iron stove. You can almost feel the strings of the calico apron tugging against your waist ...

It certainly works.