“A smart shopper can buy a 5-pound bag of Gold Medal flour for 69 cents. That’s enough to feed three people for a day – 7,500 easy-to-digest, relatively nutritious, and potentially tasty calories. All for less than 0.7 percent of an average American’s income.|Compare this American to one of our ancestors half a millennium ago, a typical person living in the span between 1400 and 1600. Back in those days, less than one-tenth of humanity lived in cities. The most basic problem of material life – the fight to put food on the table – took up the majority of everyone’s working time and energy…” J. Bradford DeLong

—The Real Shopping-Cart Revolution: Five hundred years of progress packed into a sack of flour.Wired)

Just in case the threat of war and the poor economy have you feeling down, leave it to Wired to supply an editorial reminding us all not to fall out of love with the technology that made Western culture what it is today.