Using bethel as an example for an article is a bit disingenuous. It’s not a place that people should really be living any way other than off the land. It’s like saying the groceries on the space station or at everest base camp are expensive.

It’s like 500 km from any roads and thousands from anywhere capable of agriculture as the rest of the world knows it.

It’s also mainly Yupik, and politically, idk how they vote, but they aren’t exactly politically relevant compared to the basically 3 cities with more than 10,000 people in Alaska.

In addition to what others people have mentioned (studies showing legitimate benefits to increased protein, greater need to ensure adequate protein intake for those with artificially reduced appetite, and just general dude-bro carnivore keto fads), a huge thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread is the massive dairy surplus.

Very few people drink milk as a beverage compared to 15 years ago, so the dairy industry (with the aid of the government) is trying to get as many alternative uses for dairy going as possible.

I’m actually a big fan of both of those creators. One thing that’s struck me from their work is that not enough companies who are doing things the “right” way are actually taking credit for it.

There might be a couple of statements about the material, but not much. I think partially they want to make sure they have flexibility as supply chain issues come and go, but it provides cover for PE to come in and hollow out a product and keep selling it under the good name.

If they told you all of the little details that drive the cost and lead to the quality, the moment those things start disappearing from the postings, you would know something is wrong. Like a canary in the coal mine.

Not to get way too in the weeds, but GSM isnt really the best metric for quality (or warmth). I’m just a noob in all of this, but the starting staple length of the fibers, the processing (combing vs just carding), spinning (open ended vs ring spun), fiber diameter, ply, and twist, and knitting technique come into play. Then for some fabrics, you have treatments added after the fact, so you could have a 300 GSM fabric with 75 GSM of wax on top. You could even have multiple layers of fabric in the final garment.

I’d mostly just try to look at the GSM to compare between offerings by the same brand.

There’s not many companies like that for Americans to support tho, which is why it’s one of the few products I’ll bother to name or even being up on social media.

If you want some more companies like that, check my most recent post about the Crafted With Pride catalog.

After spending some time with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s actually a lot of high quality manufacturers that have garbage websites and probably abysmal SEO. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. To be fair, I’ve mostly been looking at sites for suppliers, not necessarily the end products, though.