"support your local ____________" - c/d; s/d etc.

Can't win, don't try :-( I too need help to fight this negativism. Is it really that bad to buy big chain organic stuff? What about fair trade produce, where obviously you're racking up the food miles?

i dunno, i don't believe that's true. we live in hackney and get organic fruit and veg bags that we have to pick up every week and they have slips of paper in telling us where our stuff came from. a fair amount of it is grown in hackney city farm, most of it seems to come from norfolk, then occasionally there'll be something that comes from mainland europe. learning to eat seasonally and not demand strawberries all year round is what's u&k re: food miles...

I too need help to fight this negativism. Is it really that bad to buy big chain organic stuff?

i didn't think so until i read 'not on the label' by felicity lawrence. it's depressing reading but a very good book, really thoroughly researched, calmly and non-sensationally written with every strand followed up. basically all supermarkets are teh big bad... waitrose seems to be better than the rest but who can afford to shop at waitrose? so now i never buy any fresh fruit and veg at the supermarket - what we don't get from the bag i pick up at the local market (which is not organic but very fresh and tasty and incredibly cheap), and try to avoid buying anything else there at all. but some things are just too expensive from other places, like bouze and cheese etc.

What about fair trade produce, where obviously you're racking up the food miles?

yeah, i know. but there i think the question is if you're gonna buy that stuff anyway. if you weren't gonna buy bananas or coffee in the first place, then don't get them just because they're fair trade, but if you're gonna buy them regardless, at least try not to shit on people while you're doing it. aargh.

xpost yeah stevie i know, but i do want to live with as little negative and as much positive effect on the world and the people in it as i possibly can. oh, that's what you said. well anyway yeah, i'm trying to figure out how best to go about it...

In this example, neither the frog and sprocket nor the clearchannel cater for me, so I'd end up going to neither. I'm not the kind to go see live music just cos it's live music. In the same way, I don't listen to any local radio stations because, ahem, they say nothing to me about my life.

The REASON why buying local is better is because you get nicer stuff and better customer service, 9 times out of 10. Sometimes it's more expensive, sometimes it isn't, but as I say, it's usually nicer - the chicken from your local buther will be an awful lot tastier than the one from Tescos because it will be raised locally, usually free-range, and probably organically. It will also be twice the price, but you get what you pay for. (okay, this example doesn't apply to you specifically em, but you get the idea)

Fairtrade is a different set of arguments, and organically grown is different again. Buy your fair trade from Oxfam and your organic from the farmers market. But as we've already discussed, if you don't buy anything that's "bad", you're not left with much at all. I mean, even fluffy Quorn have dodgy business practises - you pick your fights, I guess.

this is otm.

me, i buy organic when i can (and when i can afford to), mostly cuz i'd like to avoid eating pesticides, hydrogenated oils, etc. i'm all in favor of supporting local producers, but it's not feasible to do that all the time. i do like to hit up the farmers' markets during the warmer seasons though.

that is ONE of the reasons, but it is not the REASON singular. seriously, supermarkets shit all over everyone, suppliers and customers alike. you're less likely to be contributing to/supporting an exploitative system if you're not buying from a massive international corporation whose main priority is delivering profit to their shareholders at no matter whose expense.

quorn is pretty rank anyway tbh.

In this example, neither the frog and sprocket nor the clearchannel cater for me, so I'd end up going to neither. I'm not the kind to go see live music just cos it's live music. In the same way, I don't listen to any local radio stations because, ahem, they say nothing to me about my life.

and in this example, you live in a city that provides for pretty much any live music you'd want to go to see anyway so the dilemma doesn't apply!

What about eating out? Organic produce is unquestionably the best quality but are any other than the best restaurants going to make the effort?

You don't live in London though - much as I'd love to think of herds of chickens roaming free on Barnes Common, they don't. I have also noticed that my local greengrocer sells lower quality produce than the supermarket, presumably because they don't get fresh stocks in daily so the fruit and veg can become a bit withered and wilted.

I don't really see supermarkets as offering "customer service" at all - a good experience is a quick and efficient one, but I'd never expect individual attention, nor would I want it.

the best-quality produce in my neighborhood is at a store called garden of eden, but apparently they don't treat their workers well -- some employees were striking outside the premises yesterday. i go in there maybe three times a year, so i don't feel all that guilty myself.

If I want to see live music, I go to the venue that is showing the music I want to see, whether that's a local pub or the SECC. I have no loyalty to anything, except my "local" pub which is actually a couple of miles down the road, but it feels like a local and is everything I like in a pub.

Food, I get from the supermarket, and occasionally from the farmers' market. We don't have a decent butcher or grocer left in town (this looks, I realise, because of people like me not using them, but I did when they were there!), and I have a supermarket on my doorstep. Again, convenience and cost rule over principle, I'm afraid. I admire emsk's idealism a lot, but it's just not that practical where I live.

heheh :) good example. i am baffled when people support shitty teams that aren't their local team though - i mean, why? how did that happen? eg my aunt grew up in selby but supports leyton orient. and not only supports but is completely totally mad for and obsessed with, travels to all their away games and does their fanzine and all sorts. and they're SHIT.

When I had a decent local greengrocer/deli I never went to the supermarket. Now I don't, and I'm not able to plan my food intake for the next week and buy it all in advance, so Sainsbury's is pretty much the only option.

where do you live, out of interest?

Surely if I'm buying anything from there it's better that it's organic? It's sending a message that their customers are interested in these things, even if the stores are not going to go out of their way to source the most ethical and low-impact products.

yeh this is true. they're still going to pay the least for their organic produce they possibly can and charge the most they possibly can, but at least there are certain standards they have to adhere to.

Until he jumped on the Celtic supporting bandwagon in the mid-1990s.

I am *still* struggling to think of anything local other than pubs that I am loyal to. I feel bad about myself now :(

*not AFC Wombledon, the other ones like Dundee

People get annoyed when moral imperatives start getting bandied about. It seems to me perfectly sensible to expect to hear people lash around moral imperatives about moral choices ("you should support places who treat their staff well").

It's much less good to hear people laying moral imperatives on economic choices, for obvious reasons: if you don't have the cash to spend on organic spuds then some fool getting moral about it isn't going to help anyone.

Confusing aesthetic choices with moral ones is just wrong-headed. If you feel no connection to your local football team then why should you support them? If someone feels a connection with a community whch is not obviously "their own", it seems fair enough to me. We're not in the business of policing who belongs to what community, are we?

as for examples of supporting local being bad, how about schools? many people decide to send their kids further away because of better facilities, over-riding the cost of transporting them further.

London, Waterloo. Borough Market is a reasonable walk away so I try and go there for meat to stock up the freezer with but for the day-to-day necesseties it's not that great - well it's average, just lacking in a great local 24hr well stocked deli/grocers.

but it's just not that practical where I live.

Also, I should have added, it's not that practical the way I live and the budget I live on (husband currently out of work) either. I would love organic tatties and carrots, hell, I would love to have the space and the time to grow them myself, but ain't gonna happen, no matter how much I would like it. Tim OTM, I think is what I'm trying to say.

Surely if people supported their local schools instead of perpetuating the vicious circle by taking their kids off to "better" schools leaving the ones who couldn't care less in the "worse" schools, then there wouldn't be that distinction. Kids of all abilities would be around each other, and there wouldn't be the drain of the best teachers off to the best schools and the division that there is now...

Either that or she's a nutter who picked the club more or less at random and stuck with it, like the hardcore Northampton Town fan I once met, whose whole family supported Southampton - their local team - and so he decided to do the opposite.

Either way, that's all good, innit? Supporting football, at whatever level, is not very much about the quality of the football. If it was, we'd just go see whoever was playing well at any given time. Or confine ourselves to highlights shows on the telly. Both of which are perfectly sensible choices, by the way.)

dragging the swots down!

emsk i don't think there's a definitive situation cos i think in this context y/our consumer ethics are generally accepted or supposed to be utilitarian, ie seeking greater happiness for everyone in the long run. and there are classic problems with that system - even if it's one of the best we've got for stuff like this.

it's like, ok: we may say we are responsible for every aspect of the means of production of every one our purchases because of the consequences of those means of production. we may say we are complicit in them and whatever their negative impact may be. but then we wouldn't be discussing moral absolutes, we'd be making a moral judgment on a case-by-case basis - and to do it perfectly we'd have to be well-informed to an amazing degree: not only about the causal chain of each individual purchasing decision we make over distance and through time but also about the real choices available to us and the true nature of our own values.

given all this information it's possible to imagine a situation where the sums add up to make buying something from the other side of the world ethical - you just make it the least costly alternative in utilitarian terms - but it's impossible to make a judgment about the act itself, only about its consequences. it doesn't help so much when we need make an ethical decision where the consequences are obscure, or we don't or can't predict the true outcome.

the oil will dry out soon and we'll all be eating seasonal/local anyhow.

Baldrick: In that case, I shall prepare my Turnip Surprise.
Edmund: and the surprise is...?
Baldrick: ...there's nothing else in it except the turnip.

Is this really true, though? I agree with Tim about there being an overall tangle here. I'm also interested in the assumption that because it's a local business, it's somehow more 'ethical'. I mean, why? What makes you assume that Joe Bloggs on the corner sources its produce any more ethically, or treats its staff any better? Its still a business, its raison d'etre is still, just like Tesco, to support the bottom line.

I suppose this all ties a bit into the conversation I had with Emsk the other night, when she was asking "why did Green & Black's sell to Cadbury's?" The answer being "for the money, clearly". Because someone makes nice fluffy organic goods doesn't automatically entail they are lovely lefty types. They spotted a gap in the market, and filled it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, don't assume because that what you're buying is local, or organic, or from a small business, it's de facto virtuous. Because the chances are it isn't.

But the "investors and fat cat types" ARE the owners! This is the point!

I'm not disputing that the business practices at massive supermarkets are bad, it's just there appears to be an enormous amount of romantic projection going on here.

What makes you assume that Joe Bloggs on the corner sources its produce any more ethically, or treats its staff any better? Its still a business, its raison d'etre is still, just like Tesco, to support the bottom line.

i'm not assuming this is true of all small companies. but they don't have the massive clout tesco's do, they don't have the power to say "your apples are the wrong shade of green and your tomatoes are ovoid, we're gonna use the ones from another of our suppliers and return yours to you, all at your cost" that big chains do...

and what green and black's did was silly cos, ok, there'll still be a lot of people who will continue to buy it because it's just really nice chocolate, but there will be plenty who were also buying it because it was indie chocolate, and now they won't.

Does this include Starbucks employees outside the US?

i'm also not too convinced that local butchers are necessarily better in terms of being organic, having local produce etc, at least not in cities. some are, some aren't.

* nonwithstanding the tiny deli/coffeeshop near my work, which does not use Starbucks coffee beans and makes delicious cappucino, surprisingly.

-- Matt DC (runmd...), December 29th, 2005.

Since when does small business owner = investor/fat cat type?

1) I don't drink much coffee and prefer to make it myself
2) I don't sit around in coffeeshops and hang out. That is what bars are for.
3) Starbucks has better benefits for its employees than any single indie coffeeshop I've known in any city
4) Starbucks has hot caramel apple cider
5) Indie coffeeshops now charge just as much as Starbucks so I don't even have a financial compunction to walk the extra mile

Winner: Starbucks

(please note actual winner: Korean dude at the deli 3 doors down from my workplace, since he's closer than Starbucks)

Starbucks=bad because of horrendous global homogenisation of culture

well obviously, but it's inescapable. independent stores are great, but starbucks serves a different purpose to me -- it's not somewhere that i want to spend hours upon hours kicking back and using the wifi or reading a book, it's somewhere i can come in from the freezing cold to warm up for a few minutes, use the can, refuel with a quick espresso. i'm one of those awful yuppies who LOOK for a starbucks when i need to do those things.

XPOST ALL DELIS ARE KOREAN!! My deli guy likes to serenade me with John Denver songs, it's odd. I should go over there, actually, he gave me a coupon for a free cappucino.

in fact i tried studying there a couple of months back and then the cast of friends walked in, being all gooey and showing off their babies. i had to leave.

(Not to mention that argument is speaking from the luxury of cities, in many suburbs Starbucks is your only choice for ridiculous so-called coffee beverages)

xpost are you serious? Friends? Did they not realize how lame it was for them to be hanging out...in a coffeeshop?

Generally if I'm outside a major city, I'm quite HAPPY to see Starbucks. If global culture is going to be all homogenized anyway, I'd rather at least have a decent cup of coffee. But when I'm here at home I can get much better coffee at a local place that roasts its own beans anyway, and I like chatting with the owner and the people who work there. We also have a great local tea shop run by a woman about my age, and my gf and I like going there and hanging out occasionally.

Point being I don't see local v. chain as an all-or-nothing issue, but there are certainly tangibly nice things about supporting local businesses. I did a lot of gift shopping at the tea shop, for example, and I know that I'm helping a person my age who lives in my town succeed. I also talked her into carrying my CD, and I know she talks my band up to people as well. You just can't do stuff like that with a chain.