[zdragnar]

My grandparents (who were farmers) would frequently joke that city folk always thought beets came from cans at the store and didn't know they grew in the ground.

I imagine the same city folk laughed at all the things country rubes like my grandparents didn't know. Of course, one being the child of an immigrant and the other immigrating as a child, and quite poor to boot, they would have faced plenty of derision for that as well. IIRC they also didn't get indoor plumbing and toilets until the early 1950's, so they probably would have been laughed at for that too.

[lumost]

It does make one wonder how long the supply chain can get before people forget what's on the other side of it. The Roman's only had a vague concept of how silk was made and where it came from. The Chinese a vague idea of daqin, the opposite of the Qin empire.

A farmer be forgiven for believing that their fertilizer is made from manure and not petrochemicals made thousands of miles away?

[seabird]

Farmers know absurd amounts about the fertilizer they're using. Frankly, they probably know more about any given facet of the modern world than the average person. Having to pull multi-million dollar lines of credit and constantly staying up-to-date with any technology that touches your business will do funny things to people. That extends to most people that make things; they know who it goes to and how it gets there, but the person who gets it doesn't know where it came from and how it got to them.

[philwelch]

Yeah there was a viral video awhile back where this young woman on a family farm was sitting in her tractor talking about how everything worked. The tractor has more computer screens than my desk ever had and a GIS system.

> That extends to most people that make things; they know who it goes to and how it gets there, but the person who gets it doesn't know where it came from and how it got to them.

People who make things seriously, at least. People who think groceries come from the store and haven’t thought past that will still be able to cook a meal while a more serious home cook or a good professional chef knows more about where their ingredients come from. But this only goes a couple levels deep at most. The chef might know where the farmer’s fertilizer comes from (I think that’s part of what’s implied by “organic food”) but the farmer will definitely know. But for petrochemical fertilizer, there’s a whole petrochemical supply chain before that which the fertilizer manufacturer will understand even better than the farmer.

[AlbertCory]

"City folk encountering their country cousins" used to be a standard trope of comedy. The very fact that it's not anymore tells you all you need to know about urbanization.

[danjoredd]

That was pretty much the entire joke behind both Green Acres and the Beverly Hillbillies, to show the difference of cultures in America in an absurd way. Seeing everything become homogeneous is kind of sad

[mbg721]

Sort of...Green Acres seemed more to exploit that difference to create an absurd environment in general. (Filmways had a lot of trained farm animals around anyway.) The recurring joke was that Eddie Albert had an idyllic vision of being a lawyer retiring to farm life, and all of the objectively insane things people there did made perfect sense to everyone except him, including Eva Gabor.

[29athrowaway]

In 1957, the BBC pranked people for April Fools' day claiming that spaghetti comes form spaghetti trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax

[KptMarchewa]

The video is worth a watch' https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU