Why Homemade Beats Machine Manufacturing

Modern society has a whole host of wonders that make life very comfortable and exciting for a larger share of the world’s population than most people can imagine. Consumer goods are plentiful, thanks in large measure to modern machine manufacturing techniques that are designed to produce as many copies of any individual product as the markets can bear. And yet, for all that plenty, the people of the world often seem as miserable as they’ve always been.

A large part of that may have something to do with the very nature of those products we use. Take pottery, for example. As mass production and modern materials began to replace the more traditional handmade plates, bowls, pots, and other assorted dinnerware, the warmth and natural feel of those items became less and less prominent in the average person’s home. You can see it today when you walk into almost any modern setting: cold, sanitary dinnerware, furnishings, and décor.

It’s as though we’ve driven nature from our lives to such an extent that we are now interfaced more with machines than with the environment in which we live. When we dine on plates that all look the same, and feel the same, and sound the same, there should be little wonder about why the very nature of the dining experience has been so sanitized in recent decades. There is no connection to life in those dining implements. There is no evidence of human imagination. There is only the cold sterility of the machine.

For a variety of reasons, there is a definite advantage to a return to the use of those homemade dinnerware products – and indeed, greater reliance on handcrafted items of every kind. With pottery, however, those advantages are often easier to immediately understand.

A great piece of artisan dinnerware is not just something you eat from; it is art. Few people ever look at a bland, machine-manufactured plate and think about the process used to make it. When you hold that handmade plate in your hand, however, you feel the texture and the weight and the energy of the artist who crafted it.

There’s also the timelessness aspect of it all. How many people do you know who have dinnerware heirlooms that were originally made by machines? Probably not many, right? In contrast, handmade plates, vases, pots, and the like are things that have a timeless appeal. They are decorative, functional, and meaningful enough in the life of any family to warrant saving from generation to generation. Handcrafted offers a form of permanence that mass-production does not.

Now, we’re not suggesting that you throw away all of your machine-made products and rush out to replace them with artisan pieces tomorrow. Obviously, that might be difficult for most people to manage even under the best of circumstances. However, there are so many benefits to incorporating handcrafted products into your life that it’s well worth the effort to at least being to make some of those changes. Just check out our Gaia Collection and you’ll see just how easy it can be to add the finest artisan dinnerware pieces to your home ensemble.