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… is offered in celebration of the local farmers’ market that I visit on most Saturday mornings during the Summer and early Fall.
But just how local is that market, with all of its stalls set up in Burke, Virginia (a suburb just outside of D.C.’s beltway)? Some farmers drive in from West Virginia, and others from Maryland. And the Virginia farmers selling their produce and wares in Burke are rarely from Burke. They’re from places such as Culpeper and Rixeyville. Oh, and the accents of the farmers reveal that many of them hail from Central or South America – just like one of my favorite things to buy at the farmers’ market: tomatoes.
So, with that prelude, here’s today’s quotation; it’s from pages 114-115 of Tyler Cowen’s insightful 2002 book, Creative Destruction [2]:
Customers must refer to standards if they are to accurately judge the quality of local products. These standards are inevitably comparative in nature and therefore require exposure to other cultures. Americans who have sampled European food typically have higher standards for fresh ingredients and good bread than those who have not. European customers have demanded better salad bars from their restaurants, following visits to the United States.
I refer readers enamored of the notion “buy local” to the whole of Tyler’s book as well as to Pierre Desrochers’s and Hiroko Shimizu’s 2012 book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet [3].