“Eat locally” some of our dieticians and nutritionists say. Theoretically, local could be good. Local honey may have pollen from local plants and offer benefits that honey from across the continent or from some other continent won’t bestow. Local farmers will benefit from buying and eating local foods.
But coffee, sugar, wine and some other great foods aren’t made near us. Tea isn’t local. Chocolate comes from far away and I want it. Same with bananas, especially in winter, about 8 months of the year in Wisconsin.
I took a short course in Chinese language and learned that the Chinese or some of them maybe, have a long tradition of believing that certain foods should be eaten at certain times of the year. For them, eating watermelon is winter is unwise and unhealthy.
Local plays, news and opinion columns, artists might not compare well to the best to be found in a large city or in a nationwide competition. Athletes from a large city or even a large school are often better than those from small schools, simply because of sampling. The best of 1000 is likely, but not certain, to be better than the best of 100.
A German woman wrote a master’s thesis on strawberry yogurt. She found that, all within Germany, the strawberry fields, the milk, the processing plants were located in such a way that strawberry yogurt ready for purchase and eating in a store had traveled 5000 miles here and there before being finished. Her point was that proper relocation could have made the whole operation a local one.
Of course, it makes sense to try trade with local businesses. That way, they benefit and you get to know what is going on locally. Not only that, but local businesses and artists may be exempt from some national craze or silliness that you want to avoid.
Still, it is quite easy to see what is going on in France or South Africa or Sydney. More and more, we are traveling to all spots on the globe. “Local” is getting to mean “this planet”, at least until we run out of oil.
