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.