Imagine a world with two neighboring towns, Fairfield and Ottumwa. Fairfield makes very high quality chairs, Ottumwa makes very good cheese. What would happen if the chair maker in Ottumwa asked everyone to “buy local,” and get their chairs from him instead of from Fairfield?

His arguments would be familiar:

1. For every $100 you spend in my chair shop, $68 is returned to the community through taxes, payroll, and my own spending.
2. If you don’t buy local chairs, we won’t have a local chair shop anymore.
3. If everyone purchased local chairs we would keep all of our money in the community, which will make us all better off.

All of this is nonsense, and it’s not difficult to see why if we reduce the situation further. Imagine everyone took his advice and stopped trading cheese for chairs. Fairfield’s citizens would no longer have high quality cheese, and Ottumwa would no longer have high quality chairs. Both towns are worse off.

Imagine further that Ottumwa continues to successfully encourage local shopping and succeeds in supporting all of its local businesses. They have a guy who makes dull knives, they have another guy making okay vegetables, and myriad other citizens make everything the town needs. Now let’s compare them to Fairfield, which trades chairs for everything it needs. It trades with Iowa city to get sharp knives, and with Mt. Pleasant to get high quality meat. It gets everything it needs from other cities who also have an exemplary skill, be it knife making or chicken farming.

Ottumwa, whose citizens all buy locally produced products, enjoys only one high quality product — cheese. Fairfield, on the other hand, who’s citizens only produce chairs, enjoy high quality everything.

It is easy to imagine that keeping money close to home is a good idea, but if we remove the confusion of money from the situation and imagine we are simply trading goods with other towns, it is easy to see that when towns trade, everyone enjoys higher quality products at no cost to themselves. We have great chairs, you have great cheese, let’s share!

If trade is removed, each citizen in each town is worse off. The only benefactor of the buy local ideas are the crappy cheese maker in Fairfield or the uncomfy-chair maker in Ottumwa; they become rich when locals feel guilty about trading with their neighbors.

There is no benefit to “keeping money in the community.”  The statement is absurd, akin to saying “keep chairs in the community,” which would be pointless.  Trading chairs to other towns doesn’t hurt Fairfield residents.  It isn’t as if there are a limited amount of chairs, and we must pass them around amongst ourselves in order to have a healthy economy.  To the contrary, the more chairs that leave the community via trade, the better off all of us will be.

Additionally, the term “local” is subjective in nature.  How far does one need to go before a product is not “local” anymore?  Would it not make more sense to view the entire world as “local” and compare the value and quality of each product in that light, rather than believing that buying from your neighbor three doors away is better than buying from the one three blocks away?

Let’s go further with our simplistic example and imagine that our neighboring town, Batavia, has no skills and no products. Its workers are uneducated and there are no industries there. Everyone is living in huts and foraging for food.  Fairfield’s chairs are the best in the area and that people in Chicago are traveling to purchase chairs from us. We need to produce more. What is the answer? We set up a chair factory in Batavia. Unfortunately everyone there wants to work in the chair factory, but none have skills, all need to be trained from scratch (high quality chair making is complicated, delicate work) and all of them virtually beg for a job instead of their continued foraging and dumpster diving.

The factory in Batavia helps the citizens there, and it helps the people in Chicago, who want better chairs, and it helps Fairfield, which is able to enjoy more and more high quality products when it trades away its chairs. Eventually, the low pay rates in Batavia will rise as workers there become skilled, save money, and move to thinking about making something of value instead of wasting their lives looking for food and shelter.

Buying products made in Batavia supports the Batavians, the Fairfield residents, and all residents of the entire surrounding area who wish to own Fairfield’s chairs.  Without the Batavian factory, Batavians would forage for food, Fairfield would have less money, and the people of the surrounding area would have lower quality chairs.

Obviously this is a simplified example.  Batavians being forced to work in horrible conditions, the pollution involved in transport, and other problems are not discussed in order to present an understanding of trade in its pure form.  The complications of modern globalization are a topic for another day.

Food, Inc. at Morning Star Studio, Saturday, November 28. Film and panel discussion sponsored by JFAN, Radiance Dairy, Buy Fresh Buy Local, SLC, Sierra Club, and KRUU-FM.

So, what’s really in the food you are eating? Food, Inc., a highly acclaimed expose by producer/director Robert Kenner, is a searing look at what we call food these days. This eye-opening documentary will be shown on Saturday, November 28 at 7:00 pm at Morning Star Studio.

Compelling and powerful €“ it rates 97% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer €“ Food, Inc. lifts the veil of secrecy on the US food industry. Investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) divulge the real cost of the €œcheap€ food we buy and its impacts on consumer health, the livelihood of American farmers, worker safety, and the environment.

€œThere hasn’t been a film this important about American food production, and probably not about industrialized food anywhere,€ says Corby Kummer in The Atlantic.

A panel discussion will follow the film, featuring Francis Thicke, co-owner and co-operator of Radiance Dairy; Mary Carter, director of Buy Fresh Buy Local; and organic farmer Steve Hickenbottom. The film is sponsored by Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, Inc. in partnership with Radiance Dairy, Buy Fresh Buy Local, Sustainable Living Coalition, Sierra Club, and KRUU-FM.

Interviews with food experts, farmers, businessmen, government representatives, and food advocates reveal where our food comes from and how it is made. Creative animation and clever graphics interspersed throughout the film expose the highly mechanized, Orwellian corporate underbelly deliberately hidden from the American consumer.

The film also features courageous people, like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin, who are finding ways to work inside and outside the system to improve food quality. Others are brave men and women who have chosen to speak out, such as chicken farmer Carole Morison, seed cleaner Moe Parr, and food safety advocate Barbara Kowalcyk.

While Food, Inc. doesn’t contain representatives from the food giants, it’s not from a lack of trying. Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue and Smithfield all refused to be interviewed for the film.

“Don’t take another bite till you see Food, Inc.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

Need we say more?

Admission to Food, Inc. is $5. An organic bake sale will be held. Donations and all profits support the work of the sponsoring organizations.

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Before I get into anything, I have to say how overwhelmingly proud I am to live in a town with a “sustainability plan.” Even if it was just a piece of paper that said “sustainability plan for Fairfield, Iowa” over and over again, just the sheer fact that it exists puts us head and shoulders above almost every other town and city in America. Any suggestions I make regarding the plan, then, are with the underlying idea that it’s amazing and I’m all for it.

Fairfield is a great proving ground for this new direction. At 9,000+ in-town population and over 13,000 in the county, we’re not not so large as to hinder communication, but not so small as to avoid notice from larger communities. As the population runs from ultra-conservatives to extreme liberals, and from multi-generational rural agricultural families to new-aged hippie-types, we will certainly figure out a way to make these changes appealing to both ends. Read the full story

I’ve often told the story of how Fairfield Iowa’s Radiance Dairy got me drinking milk again .  I really don’t know how much their milk costs because I absolutely have to have it – it’s a staple around my house.  Standing at the open fridge and guzzling out of the jug are one of the few things left for this 40 year old that make me feel 18 again. Read the full story