--- title: "Buy Local" url: "https://books.mutin.life/7/choose-life-habits-that-feel-good-and-do-good/80/buy-local" --- # Buy Local *The truck is now the "red blood cell" of the economic system. Without it, the end of supply chains: not one factory runs anymore, not one shop is stocked, not one building site takes place, not one harvest is delivered.* Jancovici The day there is no more oil, today's trucks will no longer be able to run. Nor will tractors. It takes time to reorganise locally, to once again produce locally what is essential for living. Decades will be needed for this reorganisation. Let us not wait to starve. Let us anticipate and organise ourselves now, in order to manage to feed the whole population locally. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Voting with our wallets This is probably the first habit we can set in motion in our daily lives: buy local. Voting with our wallets, by buying mostly — or even only — products made as close to home as possible. Starting with food. Buying food produced as close to home as possible, with as few machines as possible, and as unprocessed as possible. In the same way, we can vote with our wallets by buying mostly from local businesses the products and services we really need to live. This vote with our personal money is far more powerful than a piece of paper in a ballot box that elects a corruptible person, who may change their mind, or who does not share our opinions on every subject. The more things we buy, especially from far away, => the more ore extraction pollutes the atmosphere and the groundwater, => the more the quantity of CO2 released into the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect => the more the temperature rises and the more drought makes the Earth's surface arid, impossible to cultivate => the more agricultural yields will fall => the more of us will die of hunger in a few decades, especially the day the underground oil stocks are almost empty and tractors consequently have no fuel to run and help us improve agricultural yields. Conversely, every time we lower imports, using local added value, we lower our emissions of pollution and greenhouse gases, and we lower our dependence on hydrocarbons while supporting the country's economy. Each transport avoided, each journey avoided, is that much CO2 kept out of the atmosphere. Every product we buy required a lot of transport: for its manufacture, and for its delivery. So let us minimise transport by buying locally. Let us relocalise production to anticipate the future without fossil fuels that we will be subjected to, and thereby gain new lasting jobs in the country. That is what democracy is: to show that we want to relocalise production in our country, let us buy local. What we buy is our real ballot paper. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Eating local, and as unmechanised as possible To support and encourage this local agricultural production, let us buy, as a priority, local food, as unmechanised as possible, having used as little fertiliser and pesticide as possible, as unprocessed as possible, in as little packaging as possible. Without oil, there is no more fuel for tractors, nor for making fertilisers and pesticides. Without oil, agricultural yields will collapse. The day there is no more oil imported into Europe, if the number of farmers is not sufficient, and local agricultural production is not sufficient to feed the population, there will be famine. It is urgent to organise ourselves now, so as to be ready to feed the local population when there is no more oil. Let us encourage the establishment of many new farmers around us, by buying food produced as close to home as possible. Prioritising food that has used as few machines as possible: without fertilisers or pesticides, without ploughing, produced mostly by hand. So as to anticipate the future in which we will no longer have access to fossil fuels to run the machines. When food is produced without fertilisers or pesticides, and without the help of tractors, yields are lower. As a result, the cost of such food is higher, so that producers can make a living from their work. And this cost of organic, minimally mechanised agriculture is in fact the true cost of what it is worth. Indeed, it is the current, abnormally low cost of food that is a complete aberration. Currently, only 7% of the food till receipt goes to farmers. Because, with the majority of people living in cities, we mostly pay for: - the transport of this food from the places of production, - the construction of the trucks for this transport, - the packaging for transport, - the shelf-stocking in the shops, - and the advertising to attract people into these shops. 18% of French farmers live below the poverty line. Yet without them, we could not feed ourselves and work in turn. It is time to pay them what they are truly worth. Before the use of oil, half of what people earned was spent on food. Today, eating costs between 10 and 15% of what people earn — and even then: most of what we pay is not food: shops, transport costs, sales staff, advertising, hypermarket shareholders' dividends... In reality we pay for our food only 1/4 of the price at which we buy it. And that is for an unprocessed product... We could say, for example, that we have paid more for advertising — that is, for a TV channel's airtime — than for food... Today, it is only a few % of what we earn that we spend on food. Moreover, the majority of people today no longer cook: they buy pasta, ready meals, tinned food, yoghurts, etc. — that is, processed products. So we pay the processors. If we simply cooked our own vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, etc., farmers would already be better paid. Farmers are paid even more when we buy their products directly at the farm, on site, on their holding, or at least as close as possible to their places of production (as little transport as possible). Let us buy food that is as unprocessed as possible (in French) In any case, whether savoury dishes or sweet desserts, nothing is ever better than what we prepare and cook at home. All these processed products are, every time, a disappointment in taste and flavour — matching the damage they cause to our health. Some may retort that they have no time to cook. Nevertheless, will we find the time to treat ourselves once we are seriously ill from having eaten so badly? Is it not better to organise ourselves to find the time to cook our own meals from organic ingredients — even if it means taking them to our workplaces — rather than letting these processed foods, stuffed with pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, poison our bodies slowly, destroy our health, sinking the social security debt a little deeper with each new patient? The day there is no more oil and the responsibility-shedding social security system no longer exists, we will have to bear our own healthcare costs: on that day, we will pay much more attention to keeping our bodies healthy; we will pay attention to what we eat. Why wait? Let us take responsibility, and take care of our health starting now, by choosing healthy, quality food. *Let us recall that today, when we go through a shop checkout (most often a supermarket), less than 10% of the till receipt pays for the agriculture itself (in restaurants it is even less).* *The rest is the wages of the people who warehouse and store, who ring up our purchases, who transport, who cook in our place (turning wheat into pasta, tomatoes into sauce, chicken into nuggets, milk into yoghurts...), who make the packaging (indispensable with transport), who build shops, factories and trucks (one in four to one in three transports something to eat or drink in our country), who do the advertising — not forgetting a few bankers and shareholders strolling here and there along the value chain.* *The upshot: today food itself represents 2% of what we earn, with all the rest of the "food expenditure" paying for the added value of the intermediaries. That is roughly 10 times less than a century ago, for 3 times more meat.* Jancovici Organic, local, packaging-free food is more expensive, and yet so much closer to the price of its true value given the service rendered. It is the price of industrial food that is an aberration. One need only spend a season with an organic market gardener who uses no machines to realise the labour it represents. It is all very well to criticise and denounce oil producers — admittedly some of their practices are unacceptable — but on our side, are we ready to go back to working the fields by hand? Are we ready even just to pay those who work without machines what they are truly worth? Every time we buy food produced with fertilisers, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, coming from the other side of the planet, sold in multiple layers of packaging, we take part in this immoderate consumption of oil. Likewise, in another register, every time we put petrol in our vehicle, or take a plane to go on holiday miles away for example, we finance these oil-producing companies. So before spitting on oil producers, let us first readjust our own oil consumption habits. Before accusing others, even if it is legitimate, we should first sweep in front of our own door. Those who feed us healthily deserve to be paid what they are truly worth. Let us agree to pay the real cost of food, at its fair value. We can also realise this simply by comparing the budget we currently allocate to food with the one we grant so much more willingly to drinks, tobacco, alcohol, smartphones, clothes... People currently spend less on vegetables than on cigarettes. People currently spend less on food than on digital subscriptions, computers, televisions, smartphones. Should the share of our budget not be mostly allocated to what is essential for survival? Currently, we devote less than 10% of our food budget to organic products. Should the share of our food budget not be mostly allocated to what is healthy for our bodies, without deadly poisons, for us and for all life on this planet? *In 2024, according to Les Echos, the French spent 12 billion euros on organic products. In 2023, household food expenditure (including non-alcoholic drinks) represented 184 billion euros. Organic is therefore less than 10% of this subset: that is not much.* *If we look at this food expenditure in a little more detail, non-alcoholic drinks alone (in plain terms, bottled water and sodas) represented 15 billion euros.* *Even if there is some overlap (organic syrups exist), just "switching over" this item, which is not exactly nutritionally indispensable, would double the organic market!* *Better still, households spent 51 billion euros on "alcoholic drinks, tobacco and narcotics", including 24 billion euros on tobacco, whereas vegetables amount to only 20 billion (INSEE does not specify the fruit budget, but it must be even lower). We pay more to damage our health than to preserve it.* *And incidentally, fuel does not cost us more than tobacco+alcohol combined... or than what we spend on TVs, computers, smartphones, and various digital subscriptions (also of the order of 50 billion per year).* *All this to say that, in view of what we spend on many "comfort" items, for a good proportion of households it is largely a question of personal trade-offs — and therefore of choice — whether to buy organic or not.* *There is another item that is very significant in our spending: restaurants, to which we leave 100 billion euros a year. When we eat out, the price of the food products is far from being what counts most in the bill: if we take their price at the farm gate, it will represent less — even much less — than 10% most of the time.* Jancovici Finally, let us be aware of the pitfalls of free trade pushed to the extreme. The price of cereals is set by world markets, for example. And as long as countries allow food imports, food produced in countries with no environmental constraints to respect is inevitably cheaper on the shelf, despite the cost of transport. When we buy this cheapest food — which has destroyed forests, which has used fertilisers and pesticides, which has released tonnes of CO2 just in transport from the other side of the world — we contribute to our own downfall. There are only two solutions: - either the tops of the hierarchies in place in each country ban food imports, and the only food source is then produced within the country, respecting environmental laws - or we change our consumption habits by increasing the share of our budget devoted to healthy, local food As we have already shown in the previous chapters that there is nothing to expect from the tops of hierarchies, only the second solution remains: taking responsibility for ourselves and allocating a larger share of our budget to what determines our health and our daily energy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Buying from local businesses In the same way, with a view to preparing for the future without oil, let us encourage local businesses that make products we really need to live: insulation and materials for building renovation, clothes, bicycles, heat pumps, washing machines, refrigerators... Let us buy these products from the businesses closest to home, so that there are enough of them for the day when there is no more oil to transport all these products. At the same time, buying as locally as possible means as little transport as possible, and therefore less CO2 released. Even if many ores from faraway countries remain necessary, we can at least choose to buy products whose final manufacture is close to home. There are local businesses producing insulation materials to prevent heat loss from homes. There are clothes made locally, right down to the natural raw materials produced locally: wool, linen, hemp. When we have the means, we can replace our gas or oil boilers with heat pumps made in the country. Besides preparing for the coming decades without oil, buying from local businesses recreates lasting jobs that we will need more and more in the future and that we will no longer be able to do without. Whatever product we buy — appliances, computers, smartphones, clothes... — the best habit for the planet and for our wallet remains to buy as little as possible: only when we really need it. Cotton comes from far away; on the other hand, France produces wool, linen and hemp. Only clothes made of wool, linen or hemp can be 100% made in France. A few examples of clothing, footwear, and bedding made in France, or failing that in Europe: Loom Picture WeDressFair Emoi Emoi Lemahieu 1083 Atelier Tuffery Le T-shirt propre Ardelaine Royal Mer Juin Fait Le Lin Mi Juin Nunti Sunya Oak Forest Veets Kleman Jules & Jenn MOEA O.T.A UBAC Le slip français Mina Storm Missegle Cygnes Bonsoirs