When no corner of the world has been left unexplored, and imports come with the stigma of food miles, native rare breeds and heritage fruit and vegetables have become the new exotica. But, as broadcaster and greengrocer Charlie Hicks puts it, since “there’s often a very good reason they stopped growing them in the first place” is there anything more to this new-found love of the old than nostalgia, novelty and scarcity value?
ReadSo important is trade for human life as we know it that we could credibly define our species as homo cambiens: humans who exchange. There is, however, a competing form of humanity: homo economicus. For homo cambiens, trade is about people and things; for homo economicus, it is only about the maximisation of profit. What homo economicus doesn’t realise, however, is that sustainable profit needs homo cambiens.
ReadSpot the contradiction. Today, a conscientious, ethical consumer might celebrate the start of Fairtrade Fortnight by walking into a local, independent grocery store in the South-west of England and filling his basket with honey, herbs, chocolate, dried apricots, bananas, even wine from the developing world. He might then go to the till, walking past innumerable signs boasting of how much of the shop’s stock is sourced locally, and pay in a local currency, the Bristol Pound, which uses the slogan “Our city. Our money”. To say there is a tension here is to put it mildly. Yet both Fairtrade and the new localism can be reconciled as two parts of the solution to the same problem: the injustice and unfairness of the current market economy.
ReadWe are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them. Chocolate made from cocoa beans grown by people in near slave conditions should taste more bitter than a fairly traded bar, even if it does not in a blind tasting. Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption.
ReadWe seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.
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