Consuming Like a Localist
Our local places can provide almost all of our needs, but not all of our wants.
According to Wendell Berry, good agriculture — that is agriculture which obeys the Agrarian Standard — must be adapted to its local place1. It is a non-negotiable attribute; the farmer who neglects to adapt his or her practice to their local place reneges their claim to practice good farming and can hardly be considered to care for their land. The reputation of generic, standardised, and place-ignorant agriculture is stained by a litany of failures and degraded landscapes. The history archives are full of its sordid stories: the devastation wrought by the Soviet kolkholz system2 being perhaps the most infamous example.
The ultimate flaw in the standardised, place-ignorant agricultural system — apart from its tendency towards abstractifying everything — is its habit of forcing the land to do what it isn’t designed to do, or “forcing [the land] to produce beyond its power to recover”.3 These are practices that sound a whole lot like abuse.
Conversely, locally adapted agriculture pays close attention to the needs, particularities, and wishes of the land, working within its natural limitations of soil, climate, topography, and cultural expectations. Rather than perceiving these limitations as barriers to productivity and efficiency that need to be removed, locally adapted agriculture considers these limitations as opportunities for the exercise of skilful and traditional husbandry methods and respecting these limitations as essential for proper care. What’s more, locally adapted agriculture seamlessly blends in with its surrounding natural landscape, providing aesthetic of beauty and a habitat for creatures great and small, thus forming a place of belonging. Finally, the practices of locally adapted agriculture do not cause long lasting harm — instead they build up fertility, enhance diversity and resilience, and yield high-quality produce sustainably.
Agriculture such as this is a blessing to the land, its people, and its creatures. Agriculture such as this is how agriculture ought to be.
We live, though, in a world where what is good and “ought to be” has been largely replaced by that which is efficient, that which is politically, economically, and industrially expedient, and that which is easy, entertaining, and modern. Localised agriculture must compete with a dominant agricultural system characterised by big, land-hungry machinery and even bigger fields; a world where extensive monocultures producing standardised crops suited for global markets prevail. A world where sheer scale, volume, and the mass use of external inputs masks the deterioration in quality production, soil health, and overall ecological sustainability. A world where good farming is, at worst, rejected and denigrated, and at best, ruefully longed for by those no longer able to practice it.4
If it is to survive in such a hostile world, locally adapted agriculture will rely on a support base of willing, local consumers committed to supporting their local good farmers. Without these dedicated local folk, many small farmers and local food producers would cease to exist — unable to survive in an economic climate where the government has ceased to support them,5 where the average consumer finds their produce “far too expensive”, and where agribusinesses, supermarkets, and industrial farmers either outcompete them to death or squeeze every last penny of profit out from their labour.
It cannot be stressed strongly enough: locally committed consumers are an existential requirement for good agriculture to survive.
What is urgently needed is a substantial increase in locally adapted consumption. Much like good farming, this is a good form of consumption. Agrarians are particularly susceptible to developing an unhealthily dour attitude towards consumption; viewing it as a necessary evil, but something we should strive to limit at all costs. This is mistaken. While we are right to protest against over-consumption, consumption in and of itself is not wrong. The person who never consumes anything can be described by one word: dead. We need to eat, we need to clothe ourselves, we need, from time to time, to celebrate and enjoy ourselves. We have been made to be dependent on consumption; it is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human.
As consumption is a necessity, and as we will spend a significant proportion of our lives doing it, it is imperative that we learn to consume well. We need to learn how to consume in a manner which is a blessing to the land and the people around us. In other words, we need to consume in a manner which demonstrates that we really do love our neighbour and the land we live on. This is where ‘locally adapted consumption’6 comes into play.
There are many facets to locally adapted consumption. Frugality is one integral facet: taking no more than what the land can sustainably provide. Endeavouring to purchase food that has been produced a manner which enhances or safeguards the health and sustainability of the land, its people, and its creatures, is another.
Things become a little more complicated when we consider the geographical origin of what we consume. It is a fallacy to believe just because something is local that it is good. Purchasing from the local industrial farm may be local but it is not good. Neither is purchasing foods which, in order to grow in our locality, require prodigious use of energy and external inputs — such as trying to grow peppers and cucumbers in massive glasshouses in regions above the Arctic Circle. These forms of agriculture are abusive to the land and wasteful of resources. We must remember that what is local to us is not always better.
The example of the wasteful local glasshouse highlights a feature of locally adapted consumption which must be appreciated and accepted: it will entail sacrifice. If we are to consume in coherence with our local place, then we must accept that there will be certain resources, foods, and goods that our place cannot provide. Consuming in a locally adapted manner will mean our shopping basket should be a reflection of our local place, and our diet should “taste” like the place we live — not somewhere alien to us. The age of the supermarket has entrenched in our cultural imagination that it is both normal and sustainable to consume a diet that contains next-to-no foods from your local place. This is an industrially-produced fallacy — but one we have come to expect and demand.
Our local places may be able to satisfy almost all of our needs, but they won’t be able to satisfy all of our wants.7 We, in the UK, don’t need bananas, coffee, or chocolate. For centuries, our ancestors led perfectly healthy lives without these “consumer necessities”. This is not to say it is wrong to have these wants, nor to occasionally satisfy them. One of the blessings of the modern world is the culinary diversity we can now enjoy.8 But we must appreciate these exotic foods and globalised goods are wants, not needs. Living a predominantly ‘want-based lifestyle’9 is grossly unsustainable and destructive to our places — as well as to faraway places. It is no wonder that if everyone on earth lived according to a typical western ‘want-based lifestyle’ we would need four planet Earths to sustain us.
Aligning our diet with the natural rhythms of the seasons is a further sacrificial aspect of locally based consumption. Our place may be able to naturally and sustainably produce apples and strawberries, but only in season. Again, this is not to say that it is wrong to occasionally buy food out of season, but locally adapting our consumption requires that we consider doing so as a treat rather than a norm. Fresh strawberries in winter should be as much as a treat to an adult as a lollipop is to a child.
Though entailing a sacrifice, a locally seasonal diet does have its rich joys. One such pleasure is the joy of anticipation we experience just before our favourite fruit comes back into season (fresh and long for awaited fruit always tastes sweeter). Associated with this, consuming seasonally provides motivation to restore or revitalise old festivals and traditions that celebrate the yearly return of local seasonal foods. In Germany, Spargelzeit (white asparagus season) is celebrated with vigour, and Apple Day is a popular celebration in the autumn where I live. If white asparagus and local apple varieties were available all year-round, these joyful celebrations and traditions would lack purpose and meaning; they would likely die out. All year-round abundance has deprived us of these rich and convivial traditions and celebrations. We have “gained” the ability to eat whatever we want, whenever we want, at their expense.
Other facets of locally adapted consumption are wholly pleasurable. Chief among these is enjoying what makes your place special. Each place has a number of attributes which makes it unique. One place may have chalky soil, another clay. One place may be in the shadow of a mountain, the other on a mountain plateau. One place may be in a frost-hollow, another in a sun-trap. Each of these geographical particularities, and the many interactions between them, create innumerable biophysical niches — perfect for growing some foods and useless for others.
These niches present an opportunity for skilful farmers and breeders to adapt their crops and livestock to the particular challenges and opportunities of the local biophysical conditions — thus creating regional heritage varieties and breeds unique and special to their local place. The flavours and textures of the resultant foods are rare, special, and are a sensory expression of your local place. You won’t find these foods in the supermarket — in fact, the flavours on offer in the supermarket are pitifully restricted (and often much less flavoursome) when compared to local heritage varieties. Those who have tasted a heritage tomato such as the ‘Chocolate Cherry’ will remain perennially dissatisfied with any tomato they buy from the supermarket. The same is true for those who have tasted local apple varieties — which often have the delightful characteristic of bearing locally derived names (my favourite being D’Arcy Spice10).
Enjoying these unique and flavoursome local foods is one of the greatest pleasures of locally adapting your consumption. And these foods rely on us enjoying them, seeing as they are mostly produced by small, struggling farmers and sold by small, struggling businesses.11 Every time we consume placeless and nameless varieties from the supermarket instead of the local varieties of our place, we are supporting the global economy at the expense of our local economy and all that makes it special. Tragically, the supermarket industrial complex claims many victims every year as it outcompetes local varieties and causes the extinction of many local flavours. The tragedy intensifies when we recognise our complicity in this.
In closing, it is necessary to address the chief objection levelled at locally adapted consumption: that it is expensive — prohibitively so. Few of us can afford to live entirely locally, and certainly those of us struggling to make ends meet cannot afford to do so. This unhappy state of affairs is largely a reflection of the brokenness of our economic and political systems which make local and traditional production uncompetitive, unsupported, and thus unaffordable. Instead, we are forced to rely on globalised supply chains run by large agri-corporations and transnational food providers who, in turn, rely on unsustainable farming practices to fuel their food system — dependent, as it is, on cheap food commodity prices.
Whilst this system has provided us with a glut of cheap food, it is rife with hidden costs. The most severe cost is the cheap-food paradigm comes at the expense of the livelihoods of good and traditional farmers who have been outcompeted and financially squeezed — and has concomitantly served to make local and tradition foods uncompetitively expensive for us all.
The food system is not wholly to blame, though, for our reluctance to buy local food which is relatively expensive. The other side of the ‘high cost of local food equation’ is that it is partly a fair and accurate price when the labour and production costs of the small or local farmer are taken into account. Our unwillingness to pay this price is because we have become accustomed to artificially high levels of disposable incomes and have considered expensive entertainment to be a necessity instead of good and wholesome local food. Whenever we buy something, we are making a sacrifice; the money spent can no longer be used for other things. Too many of us have become content to sacrifice the health of our local areas and our local good farmers on the altar of entertainment, fast-fashion, and numerous holidays to far-flung places — and also on the altar of eating whatever we want, whenever we want.
But what about the large proportion of our population who simply cannot afford to locally adapt their consumption? They must not feel guilty. The food system is at fault not them. They are not, however, left with nothing to do. They can teach their children the importance of local consumption with the aspiration that one day they will be able to afford what is good and sustainable. They may also be able to commit to small acts of local consumption, making a difference in a small (but far from insignificant) area of their consumptive lifestyle.
When there is a will, there is always something that can be done for the good of the land and the good of your place — no matter what your income is. However, the responsibility to live in a locally adapted manner increases in correlation with increased incomes and increased means. If we can live and consume in a more locally adapted way, I suggest that we should.
Even if it costs us.12
If just 5% of my readers tipped £1/$1 this essay would pay for itself in terms of time spent working on it.
Wendell Berry, The Agrarian Standard.
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State, for a masterful discussion of the flaws of this high-modernist and standardised agricultural system.
Wendell Berry, Private Property and the Common Wealth.
Such is the attitude of many modern-day farmers. They wish they could farm in a better way that is more nature friendly, sustainable, and even traditional, but have neither the money nor the time to do so. They struggle to survive as it is.
See the recent decision by the UK Labour government to cease supporting farmers through the Sustainable Farming Initiative.
One could also call it ‘locally responsible consumption’, but I prefer the term ‘adapted’ as this is verb implies actively conforming our consumption to the particularities of our local place.
I stress almost, as some of us will live in regions that are sparse in terms of natural resources or faming opportunities. And in a globalised, interconnected world, there are products that we now need which can only be sourced from abroad or can only be made at an affordable price using global supply chains. This is true for electronics, metals, and cotton based clothing. It is less the case for food, wood, and wollen products.
It must also be stressed that living according to our needs may be deeply uncomfortable and antithetical to what is deemed a good (or acceptable!) modern-day lifestyle. But it is what our planet and perhaps our souls need. I myself am still along way from where I want to (or should) be in living a more needs-based life.
There is a way of locally adapting our global consumption. We can buy exotic foods from small and traditional producers in foreign countries, such as from artisanal olive oil producers. This helps support small farmers in other countries who may be struggling whilst also providing us with the delights of exotic food stuffs.
A term coined by Sandoval, R. (2022) Shifting Tiny: The Environmental And Economic Benefits Of Zoning Reform For Tiny Dwellings. Arizona Journal Of Environmental Law & Policy.
From the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy.
See my essay To Buy Is To Give for more on this.
Full disclaimer. I am preaching to myself here. I have a lot of work to do with locally adapting my own lifestyle.
We are blessed to live walking distance to Canada's largest farmer's market and try and obtain as much of our vegetables and fruit from there as possible. The surrounding Mennonite farmers have their own flour mill nearby, and so we could fulfill almost all our needs locally. Witnessing that the Mennonite community is self-sustainable with the foods they grow, offers additional encouragement to pause and ask whether we "need" or "want" something. However, I am quite sure that I do *need* coffee :) Thanks for your thoughtful writing Hadden!
Well, I intended to argue that bananas are a “need” – but that would make you 0 for 3. Anyway you’re absolutely right, and we all need to think this way more often.