Made in Minnesota or Petaluma. Mad Hatter Tea House, St. Paul

1: I notice you have some photographs.

2: Yeah. For a long time I've been photographing traditional manufacturing processes at places like Red Wing Shoes and Faribault Woolen Mills. They're both old manufacturing companies, but they figured out how to compete in the global market, and both are doing fairly well now.

1: When I lived in San Francisco, I wish I'd had time to document a twine company in Petaluma. Petaluma was a town known mostly for chickens, but now it's more upscale. They have a lot of other things going on there now. Sushi restaurants, and everything else. But when you first get off the freeway, you see this old building with the roof caved in over the parts of the factory they don't use anymore.

2: Do they still make twine?

1: Yeah. I was so intrigued, I stopped in and the guy there showed me around. It was amazing. There was this one bank of twine machines driven by leather belts.

2: Red Wing Shoes has been around 100 years this year, and they still have some of their original equipment. They made new machines modeled after the 1905 machines, and people say they don't work as well. The original machines don't break down as often.

1: Nowadays we don't want to spend the money to make something that lasts 20 years. That's why the old stuff works better. I really enjoy the old stuff, the craftsmanship. But if you have an economic model set up to make money, purely, it doesn't make sense to sink all that money into something like equipment. When resources become scarce, as they may become sometime soon here, it makes more sense to make things that last.

2: They have some washers and dryers that are 50 years old and still work. They don't have any electronics. That's the thing.

3: We bought our first fridge in 1948, and it still works. It doesn't keep the ice cream cold, but it never did.

1: It's probably not as energy-efficient as new fridges.

3: Yeah.