Buy Local Food In Kitsap

The holiday gift giving season is upon us, fraught with concerns over the condition of the local and national economy, job losses, lower incomes and the like. I would like you think about using your gift money to purchase local food, local culture and local experiences as gifts so that your gift giving will produce multiple returns for you, your family and your neighbors.

Let me tell you why.
I don’t know about you but I also see a resurgence of talk about the evils of consumption and what people refer to as consumerism.

Current troubles for very large employers in the country including banks, manufacturers and communications companies all across the board highlight one of the problems connected with demonizing consumption and its importance to the economy. In “normal” times consumption comprises about two-thirds of what economists call gross domestic product, a very broad measure of economic performance.

The most recent demise of many great names in American business has to do with a lack of consumer confidence, a slowdown in consumption. Consumers are rightly concerned about their near term and long term future but the lack of confidence, distrust and reduction of consumption is what drives us all down further into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Ironic, isn’t it?

Consumption is important, the right kind of consumption.
Is it possible that the solution to the problems that face us could be solved by a change in the way we think?

For me it also makes me think again about what some students of economic science view as qualitative differences in money when used for buying/selling, lending/borrowing and giving/receiving and how they are related. In particular, financial losses behave in an oddly similar way to giving/receiving. One person, lets say a lender, looses principle on a debt when their borrower defaults and fails to repay the debt. The gain accruing to the defaulting party is sort of a gift from the lender, which “disappears” into the borrower.

It is interesting that sometimes incurring debt and debt forgiveness can have the same effect of spurring people to new action. When we stop or slow down our consuming, we all assume that’s the way it’s going to be, that those are the new rules to live by. Was all that stuff that we were producing and consuming only a year or two ago suddenly no good any more?

Maybe.

Maybe the forces which lead to all of the irrational exuberance, the aggregate sum of the thoughts of individuals in regard to how we see our present and future, drove us to make assumptions that lead to over production and consumption of products and services that didn’t deliver enough “value”. Maybe those thoughts lead to the production of “food” that doesn’t deliver real nutrition. Maybe the farming practices used in industrial food production had a deleterious effect on the de-population of people growing healthy food. Maybe the emphasis on purchasing products and food made by people thousands of miles away doesn’t deliver enough value in the re-circulation of the money spent on those purchases to our local community, the Kitsap Peninsula, in providing our producers and vendors with additional income that they will then spend again within our community, creating income and opportunities to circulate back to us.

Maybe the gifts we gave to mutual funds held in our retirement accounts from losses in securities held in those accounts could have had a better effect as gifts to our local farmers and businesses to invest in our local infrastructure giving us the freedom of the ability to produce what we need without the need for decisions made by people that we can’t connect with. Maybe if we had invested a small portion of those savings locally that those losses would not have occurred at all in the same way because we would at least have had the infrastructure that the investment produced in the first place, ready and waiting for an able bodied and willing person to use the opportunity.

Maybe.

So instead of worrying about how we can ante up for electronic gadgetry or other stuff that might give us a thrill for awhile maybe we could think about buying a CSA share from a local farmer and giving it as a gift to a family or group of friends. Maybe we could buy some local food, prepare a great meal and invite over friends to show them what a local food meal might look like. Heck, maybe we could even invite some strangers and turn them into friends, telling them all the stories about the local farmers that we had met and what they are doing. Maybe we could give family, friends and strangers (friends we haven’t met yet) an experience by hosting their attendance at local arts events, music, shows or church presentations for the season, spending time with them.

The worst thing that happens is that people stop buying and selling, investing and giving and receiving because of fear.

Maybe using our gift money to buy and give local would do extra work and help or friends and neighbors to realize that we can do something on our own to opt out of what most people think is a foregone conclusion, a deep recession. Maybe if we did that, we could begin to change our thinking to help each other and ourselves. Could it really hurt to try?

Best wishes to you.