When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they hadn’t, she said–but simply because the supermarket price had gone up. To paraphrase from memory, “It’s not right that I should not get paid just as much for my eggs, since they are a superior product.”
I am as glad as anyone about the increasing preference for local products, particularly food, over the last few years. It’s so widespread, in fact, that I don’t even need to explain why it’s a good thing, because you already know.
Anytime something gets popular, though, money comes along to ruin it. Now “local” has become a marketing gimmick, like “organic” and “fair trade” before it. “Local” has become a stand-in for high quality, even exclusivity. It has become the property of influencers with their selfie-ready, shit-free “farms”. This is the scourge of luxury localism.
A healthy, local economy is about resiliency and neighborly usefulness. Rachel and I buy eggs and meat locally because every community needs working farms paying a decent income to farm families. It is a real but secondary benefit that this food is not poisoned by corporations.
A healthy, local economy is (to use St. Paul’s metaphor) a body fitly joined together. Our communities are fractured because we no longer (or believe we no longer) need each other. As uncle Wendell said in “The Work of Local Culture”:
If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another. When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations.
That farmer’s market vendor raising her prices was an anti-community act. I imagine she paid a price in reduced egg sales. I wouldn’t know, because we’re engaged in a one-family boycott of her products. Besides, we bought some of her bread several years ago. It looked pretty but tasted bland, like luxury localism.