Musk

The smell of your leathers when you snap them on for an early morning ride. But how many motorcycle riders are sure of where those leathers came from, let alone their custom saddle? Surely more bikers utilize mom + pop leather makers  than those that pick custom interiors out of a magazine for their sports car package.

If you have ever read Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle about the conditions of the meat packing industry at the turn of the last century you may have wondered where it all went. Certainly America's appetite for meat hasn't been curbed and Sinclair describes a wasteland of chemical runoff and an entire city slapped together on a giant pile of industrial garbage. So are we to believe that refrigeration and diversification into other cities eliminated all of this waste from processing meat?

At the beginning of this century there were many documentary films made about meat packing plants in the Southwest using new chemical sterilization techniques to keep cheap meat sterile. This implies even more chemicals to dispose and I noticed that these films didn't disclose how or where leather is made after the meat processing. Certainly the industry of mass produced leather has its own barrage of chemical processes that has been outsourced to Mexico or South America to create even more chemical wastelands that governments weren't prepared for but, how did it happen?

The answer is custom, that bold buzzword that fluttered around Big Auto boardrooms in the late 1950's and 60's. How do we take the product from hardworking ranchers in the west and divide out all of the ugly chemical processes while cleaning up Chicago and Detroit? The answer is the custom leather interior. Only the best of the best pay for the custom leather interior in their Detroit muscle machine. We'll just concentrate all of the refineries to Texas and fill the empty crude barrels with toxic waste from our leather seats, one board member says.

We can ship the waste to other ports in Central and South America and store them there. Then as more elites buy their custom leather seats we'll sell them on the idea that the only way you can cruise from the meat packing sector in the Southwest to the vineyards of Napa is on our custom leather seats.

But in steps the EPA to try to get Big Auto, Big Leather, and Big Oil to clean up all of their out of country warehouses. Perfect, we'll move our leather operations out of country and build leather tanning plants in the nations with the most of our sludge to boost their economy.

The Corinthians found the buried toxic waste sites during their mission trips. That's why they partnered with Oxford Press to offer Corinthian leather for all of their leather bound books. As bible sales fell the Corinthians couldn't explain to the European sports car lovers what they found buried in the jungles and soon auto manufacturers were offering Corinthian leather standard.

Another honest leather source covered up I say, that is why I admire the Tesla company. They studied the follies of past automobile manufacturers such as Delorean and Tucker and said, not again. Tesla ensures that all of it's vehicle seats are made in the United States of America. If I had my druthers I would work for him, but, if the offer never comes I have my hand-me-down leathers.