Say Cheese and pick a filter
In lu of our class excursion to Millbank and St Jacobs on Friday to present on various components of rural life in two close but quite different towns, I noticed something interesting – why was cheese priced so differently? In the Millbank cheese factory a literal brick of cheese, and I mean a brick this guy was hefty, could be purchased for a few dollars - $3.48 is the price that sticks out in my mind. Comparatively in a St Jacobs, a much smaller piece, maybe a quarter of the size was priced three times as much! What’s with that?
Though cheese is my no means an indicator of a town at large, these price differences for the same product show that one town was created to promote a certain mentality of what rural areas are – or in the very least what the visitor idealized. Though lovely and walkable with cute shops St Jacobs aims to promote the message that they are a cute little rural place that people visit because it is St Jacobs and a nice little drive to the country before taking your $9 dollar cheese slices and artisan sausage home. I would be very surprised if those living in St Jacobs would ever go into the shops for shopping anything other than a single gift here or there – they most defiantly would go down the street to the actual grocery store for their cheese purchases. Alternatively in Milbank the grocery store there was certainly gentrified to a point with a cute barn like exterior and the cheese store was one of two businesses to have websites of their own. The stores in Millbank were directly firstly to the residents of the town with a consideration to the occasional tourist brought in for Anne Mae’s pies the next street over.
Cheese aside, the underlying question is how rural spaces and ‘the country’ are shaped by how we desire these spaces to look? Further, what does this do to those who call the areas home if their home is drastically changed and gentrified for the consumption of weekend tourists who zoom in for a few hours and zoom out with some cheese and a meticulously carved wooden chair or two? In our discussions we learned that St Jacobs is facing a rising exodus in the last few years of Mennonite families in particular who say that the area is getting too busy. Mennonite families are by no means an attraction, they are people first, a people who are commonly associated with the St Jacobs and Waterloo area and are facing increased pressures to move away as the area becomes busier. If ‘the country’ no longer feels like home to those who grew up there – how much rural is left in the area? And how much staging and cost goes into maintaining rural idylls?
