The Tyranny of the Local

The waiters and waitress at my favorite pizza place in Santa Rosa wear T-shirts that say, “Support Local Produce.” The menu repeats that slogan; it also appears in big letters on a wall for one and all to read. Pizza lovers go there in part because they want to support the local. Indeed, there is a lot of local produce on the menu - from Rafter Ranch in particular — and the owners have taken a stand with farmers’ markets across Sonoma County.

But the crucial ingredient in the pizza – which is the star attraction on the menu – does not come from anyplace remotely local. In fact, the wheat that goes to make the crust comes all the way from Italy.

I know this because the waiters and waitress have told me so repeatedly. I also have this information from a local farmer who grew local wheat, tried to sell it to the pizza place and was politely declined because, as the owner said, “I can buy Italian wheat cheaper.”

I mention all this not to embarrass the eatery or its owners, nor to tout the virtues of Italian wheat but to point out a fact that the cheerleaders for the local often don’t want to see or acknowledge: namely that it’s almost impossible to go local 100% and that if you scratch the surface you’ll hear the chant of the global beneath the local mantra that sounds good.

Richard Heinberg, a local author who has written a lot that’s intelligent about peak oil and about what he calls the decline of empire — and who also calls himself “a cheerleader for the local” —says that if one were to buy only local stuff one wouldn’t buy much stuff at all. Think about that.

There is no local gas and no local oil. There are no locally manufactured cars and trucks; there is no locally produced paper and no locally made computers. The shirt on your back was probably made in a factory hell thousands of miles away so that the barbaric working conditions are often concealed.

Yes, there is locally made wine and beer. Some of it is available at my favorite pizza place where you can purchase and enjoy an Anderson Valley Boont Amber Ale and a North Coast Brewing Company Scrimshaw Pilsner. There is also a wide selection of wines from France and Italy and on tap, Moretti, an important Italian beer.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t hear or read someone somewhere insist that we buy local stuff, as though it was immoral to buy something that originates in another part of the world. The gospel of the local has penetrated almost every aspect of culture in this part of the world, which exported goods around the world from the time that the Russians and the Spanish and the Yankees arrived here in the nineteenth-century. Northern California was able to grow financially and politically precisely because it sent furs, hides, gold, silver, lumber, wine, hops and more around the world, and because it also drew laborers from around the world who came to toil in forests, mines, fields, and factories.

We have always been a part of the global economy and it seems likely that as long as capitalism and multinational corporations exist we will continue to be part of the global economy. Imported Italian wheat is a case in point. Exported Emerald Triangle marijuana is another, along with North Coast wine and beer.

If we buy local, it would seem that we ought not to export our own local products to other places around the world that are also trying to boost their own local economies. Self-sufficiency is a worthy goal, though in practice nearly impossible to achieve.

Fans of the local don’t like to admit the obvious: that local businesses, like my favorite pizza place, want to cut operating costs, that they’ll buy on the cheap and hire workers as inexpensively as possible to keep down the cost of labor.

Local enterprises are not ipso facto morally superior to enterprises from elsewhere. Moreover, the market place is not always the best place to achieve social and economic justice. Granted, consumers who vote with their pocket books can have an impact on the economy and can even help progressive and environmentally friendly businesses.

But the buy-local movement has not put Safeway or Lucky or Walmart or Staples out of business. The overwhelming majority of shoppers will go and do go to the places where the prices are right and where the goods and services are cheaper than elsewhere. They do this because they can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods or Macy’s, or at the local farmers’ markets that have organic produce.

Localists will have to look more deeply and more carefully at their credo. They might realize that the world has had had a global economy since the sixteenth century and especially in the last 200 or so years and that if you put your money in a bank or credit union it goes sooner or later into the giant economic engine that runs the world. We might remember that much of what we hear about the local and localism is a fairy tale.

Sure, I grow my own vegetables and herbs. I’m a localist in that regard, but I also think of myself as an internationalist. There’s a lot to be said that’s positive for internationalism, for a sense of global solidarity with people who are ground down and who also rise up angry all around the world. Local superstition, local prejudice and local callousness ought not to be sanctified.

Couldn’t the tyranny of the local be replaced by something else that’s more flexible, that recognizes the contributions of immigrants who come here everyday and who bring their own customs and cultures and who don’t want to be swallowed up by our localisms that might in fact be provincialisms.

Hey, grow your own. Don’t patronize the big banks. And stay away from the mall. But if you want good pizza in Santa Rosa the chances are it will be with imported Italian wheat, made by men from Mexico, served by twenty-something-year-olds who love world music and devoured every single slice by customers wearing clothes from China, Vietnam, Thailand and more.

Time for the tyranny of the local to take a rest and for boosters of the local — including local chambers of commerce — be a bit more self-critical.