Elk Grove, in their monthly newsletter, is promoting the "shop local" line.
This is as mendacious as it gets. There is virtually nothing about Elk Grove that's local. Nothing. If there happens to be a local store owned by local residents, their products they sell are almost certainly non-local. In these cases, any value-added contributions to non-local resources are indeed local, but name me an establishment that does this?
The obvious connection is sales taxes. This contributes to Elk Grovian coffers, yes. But when I go to the TGI Friday's on Laguna Blvd and order from their menu that was designed by some focus group on the fifth floor of their corporate headquarters in Dallas, TX, I am most certainly ordering from a menu from a corporation that doesn't give a flying fuck about what sorts of local foods Elk Grove produces, what local area farmers produce, or even what this state produces. If some eleven dollar an hour twenty six year old "sampler taster" on the fourth floor says the chicken products from Arkansas are what she prefers, and the accountants on the seventh floor agree that nationwide distribution from these particular Arkansas chicken wholesalers meet the company's basic tests for quality and product repeatable reliability, then Arkansas it is. 600,000 pounds per month are "procured," distributed by TGI's 7,000 tractor-trailer "warehouses on wheels," and delivered as signature Jack Daniel's flavored chicken products.
This is local? Because I bought the end result in Elk Grove?
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Musings of an Elk Grove, CA Social Critic
2 comments:
have you/do you read michael pollan? i just finished "the omnivore's dilemma," and you will love it (if you haven't read it already). let me know if you want me to send it along.
You know, I have read it. But I don't remember who I borrowed it from. And I unfortunately barely remember it, except for a large section on corn and industrial organic. I never got through his last meal.
What struck me in particular was industrial organic. I know my CSA must use copius amounts of diesel to keep their operation running, although I tend to view it as some sorta small, hobby farm, lambs running around, that kinda thing.
And it is, much more so than a 300 acre organic lettuce farm in Salinas.
And it isn't. It's as much a small industrial outfit as large scale farming, but there are some significant advantages I see even as an urban foodie. First and foremost, the farmers aren't perpetually mired in debt. They are also fit, connected with the earth...I would venture a guess that the vast, vast majority of farmers today don't have gardens of their own. They get their food from the Alpha Beta like everyone else.
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