Playing With Your Food: Buy Local
"Buy local" is a slogan used a lot in the retail food market, specifically in agriculture. The slogan is intended to convince shoppers to buy all their food, mostly fruits and vegetables, that has been "locally grown". What the boundary is for "local" I do not know.
I never really understood the "buy local" movement. Looking into the reasons for "buying local", I found a lot of specious arguments.
What "buy local" is really about is certain food producers not wanting competition. They do not want to have to compete with other food producers for customers. They want a closed market.
Unless one wants to have a very limited choice in food, it all cannot be grown locally. Crops also fail sometimes. When was the last time there were no potatoes at the store because the season's potato crop had failed? Prince Edward Island and Idaho grow potatoes too.
We have so much food, and there is so much we can buy at the store. Foods that we take for granted today people generations ago would have thought such foodstuffs luxuries, or even unheard of. Apples were once the only winter fruit available to people because there were no other fruits that could be grown and stored through winter.
The fact that one has access to a world food market, there is competition among agriculture producers for customers, and consumers having choice, should be something one considers to be of great benefit to the producer and the consumer; because it is.
© Trevor Dailey
Abbott: Do you know they spend millions of dollars every year to put up factories just to manufacture mustard? Do you know those factories employ thousands and thousands of men just to manufacture mustard? Do you know those men take care of thousands of families and homes all on a count of mustard? And you, just because you don't like mustard. What do you want them to do? close those factories down and put all those people out of work?
Costello: You mean to sit there and tell me just because I don't eat mustard I'm [going to] close down a mustard factory? Are you trying to tell me that those thousands of people are making one little jar of mustard like this just for me? Well, if they are, you can tell 'em not to make anymore 'cause I'm not [going to] eat it!
Abbott and Costello: The Noose Hangs High (1948)