How Big Is Local?

I think I mentioned a few months ago that we’d been on the search for a local chocolate supplier. We tried several and settled on Josh’s Chocolate from Cornwall. It’s good stuff and nicely packaged but it only really covers the more milky end of the spectrum. During the process, I mentioned Willies to Yealmpton shop manager, Dawn. Don’t worry – it’s not the sort of conversation I routinely have with my work colleagues. Rather than slapping me in the face, her response was that Willies Cacao wasn’t really local and, in retrospect, I can only assume that it was because it had got too big. In Dawn’s defence, I have to admit that I’d never really thought of Willies Cacao as being local either – not because of size and distribution but, more, because the principle raw product comes from thousands of miles away.

I think we’ve both been living in cloud cuckoo land and neither size or provenance precludes all the economic or social benefits of keeping things close to home.

As well as bringing transparency, it means businesses like Willies can pay more for their cacao beans, and give them a bit of leeway to contribute more to the local East Devon community in various ways – better wages for example. So, its win-win unless you happen to be a commodity trader.  

The closer to home the ingredients are sourced, the better, but let’s face it, no one wants to go without chocolate, or coffee, or bananas etc. so needs must. It’s just how we do it. In these inflationary times, it feels as though the more times ingredients are traded, particularly within the M25, the more the price of the end product goes up. So, for all sorts of reasons, the shorter and more direct the supply chains, the better.

The whole ‘small is beautiful’ thing has its attractions but, for the most part, it’s a bit of a diversion. In many sectors, efficiencies come with scale and to suggest we can live without them is just unrealistic. For example, it’s hard to see how a sourdough baker can ever make more than a couple of hundred loaves a day – with or without spending a fortune on machinery. So, a good loaf of San Francisco sourdough is always going to cost a bob or two – but because it is what it is, every town should have a good bakery. In the same way, a one-man coffee roaster like Nigel at Dorset Coffee is, intrinsically, pretty efficient and the capital and administrative cost of scaling up really wouldn’t bring prices down – much.

Compare that with biscuit making operation making, say, Jaffa cakes. I’ve never tried it but I’d imagine it’s pretty much 100% automated and simply impossible to do on a small scale, at anything like a reasonable price, without a jaw droppingly high expenditure on machinery. So it has to be a sizeable operation – but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, or negate playing a positive role in it’s locality. 

So, if we’re going to have ‘one fits all’ food production system, rather than hand-crafted macaroons for the rich and custard creams for the rest, we need to cherry pick and not be too binary about it. As I’m sure I’ve said before, back in 2001, after Foot & Mouth when the whole local thing was gaining momentum (specifically to help farmers), I saw red when the Western Morning News gave their ‘Geoff the Chef’ local food badge to a business delivering frying oil to fish and chip shops. Maybe the term ‘local food’ should only be used when the ingredients are locally grown; then we need to find another hashtag for an awful lot of the food we sell and eat, that brings real benefit to the locality. 

Image credit: Willie’s Cocoa – Willie at his cacao farm in El Tosoro in Venezuela. 

This entry was posted in News.