Don’t get me wrong, I love farmers’ markets. I love going to the fashionable one in Borough, London, and that wonderful rich feeling you get whenever you don’t buy anything. And I love going to the one near me in south London and bantering and haggling with the fish man till he succumbs to giving me some amazing bargain like five decent-size Dover sole for a tenner.
I also really like the idea of putting money direct into the farmer’s pocket rather than helping finance yet another bloody edge-of-town Tesco. And I like the espresso man with his espresso machine. And the jolly sausage ladies. And the free-range eggs. And the Eastern European man who gives me a discount on the veg. All these are the kind of good reason as to why one might support one’s local farmers’ market. But what isn’t a good reason is this notion many people have that by shopping local they’re helping to save the planet. Because they’re not. Quite the opposite is true, in fact.
People obsessed with shopping locally — I learn from the US blogger and columnist Stephen Budiansky — are called ‘Locavores’. Locavores shop at their local farmers’ market with much the same smug, sanctimonious air some people wear in church — and for much the same reason. They believe that they are doing the Lord’s work. (Or, perhaps, in this case, Mother Gaia’s work.) They are lowering their carbon footprint. They are living ‘sustainably’. They are boosting the local economy. They are — by promoting self-sufficiency — doing their bit for ‘food security’. And in every case they are almost entirely wrong.
Of course one can quite see why Locavores think this way. Not only is it the kind of guff that’s fed to them by all those features in weekend supplements about City couples who’ve quit the rat-race and just look how marvellously apple-cheeked their curly-headed Boden catalogue kids are now! But it’s also what I call a perfect ‘I reckon’ argument: one of those truths so self-evident that if you were down the pub you wouldn’t even need to check up the facts via the internet on your iPhone.
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