“I see this in the food industry. Â There’s quite a few organizations here locally that will sell using “Amish”. Â And what they’re trying to do is create the perception that it does come from Amish producers. Â When it doesn’t. Â They don’t explicitly say so, they just say “Amish Country this”, “Amish Country that,”…”Amish” is big, “Country” is small. Â So, the customer that buys this, his…
Three Amish media links: Yours truly commenting in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on our old friend, the Amish Miracle Heater. An unheard-of tragedy in the Amish community at Holmes County. And a quirky story I stumbled across, ‘The Amishmen of Times Square’, by writer Jude Stewart.
In this second part of an interview with an anonymous Lancaster County Amishman, we look at the phenomenon of outsiders joining the Amish, using the Amish name to market and sell products to the public, Amish participation in the recent presidential election, and the meaning and purpose of shunning. (And if you missed the first part, here it is: An Amish America Q-and-A with a…
photo: amishcigar.com ‘Amish’ sells. That fact is not lost on the numerous merchants of Amish-branded stuff. Software, refrigerators, and organic cotton bedsheets are among the products that non-Amish dealers have sold under the Amish moniker or by association with Amish images. Often, the connection to bona fide ‘Amishness’ (whatever that term means) is dubious at best. David Luthy wrote an article in the mid-90s in…
Okay, just a bit lazy today on the Amish blog and trying to get my act together to go run however many miles in the freezing Polish weather (snowed yesterday!), so I am going to do a little roll call of some of my favorite posts from the past year: Do the Amish use credit cards? Settlements that failed: an evangelistic Amish group in Ohio…
Here’s an ad for Amish Naturals pasta. It hits all the main points–made by Amish hands, ingredients cultivated in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country, water from Amish wells, and the noodle plant was even constructed by Amish workers. Plus it’s all-organic. As the Amish population continues its explosive growth, ‘wellness living’Â increases in popularity, and the Amish mystique shines ever brighter, city folk hankering…
‘Amish’ sells. Whether it’s an overpriced bag of trail mix or a six-figure kitchen cabinet installation, people gravitate towards the implicit quality of anything with the Amish label. Exactly what does that label mean anyway? Does tobacco grown in the general vicinity of Amish country count as ‘Amish’? What about an RV produced at a factory with Amish workers? Does an Amish person actually have…