I'm currently reading John Grant's Green Marketing Manifesto, and very interesting it is too. One nugget I've just picked up is that eating locally grown, unprocessed food just once per week cuts about 2 tonnes off your annual carbon footprint - ten times more than you can save by reducing the temperature on your washing machine.
I became a convert to local food about 12 years ago, when I moved into a house with a large enough garden to be able to grow a lot of my own produce. Aside from the self-satisfied glow of growing your own, the main difference about local food is that it tastes so much better. This is hardly surprising, when supermarket fresh produce is bred mainly for appearance and longevity in storage, not for taste.
I probably end up in one supermarket or another a couple of times per week (though not usually for fresh stuff). I think it's hypocritical to criticise the supermarkets for wishing to expand their businesses. I am offended by many of their common practices, both in squeezing the juice out of their suppliers and in confusing, bamboozling and perfuming the customer into buying unnecessary or wasteful products. But the more I think about it, the more I am baffled by the willingness of the customer to be enslaved. Large-scale shopping is, by any measure, incredibly inconvenient. For a start you're at quite a disadvantage if you don't have a car (some people really only have a car so they can go to the supermarket). Then you have to drag a recalcitrant trolley around the shop, and the order you load things in it is completely perverse: soft, fresh, perishable fruit and veg first; then bread; then big, bulky but light stuff such as toilet rolls somewhere over half way down; and finally all those heavy, solid objects like fruit juice cartons and wine bottles. Whoever invented that convention was certainly either deluded or sadistic. Eventually your over-laden, ocean-going tanker of a trolley finds its own way to a lengthy queue of its brethren. Then you have to empty the whole thing out onto the conveyor, only to load it up again at break-neck speed, probably in the wrong order. THEN you haul it out to the car, THEN you find ways to put it in the car without it falling all about the place on the way home and THEN you have to unload it all.
The majority of people do this time and time again, as a matter of course, about once a week, for their entire lives.
Blimey.
But just imagine what would happen if we decided to stop this crazy hamster-wheel. The "retail economy" would grind to a halt. Acres of tarmac would stand as empty as abandoned airfields. A handful of (perhaps electric) lorries would deliver things to your house at pre-arranged times. You would have time to sit and read the paper and have a cup of tea, take on your 7 month old child in a nail-biting game of noughts and crosses or - controversially - tend to your vegetable patch. Chaos would reign and the end of civilisation would be upon us.
So before you pledge yourself to the 'eating local once a week' challenge, just be sure you've weighed up the pros and cons.
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