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| BUYING LOCAL |
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| RASPBERRIES AND BLUEBERRIES |
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| THE HONOR SYSTEM |
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| CHERRIES AT APPLE HILL ORCHARD |
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| BETTER THAN BING? |
Friday, 7:00 AM. 70.5 degrees. Wind W, light. The sky is cloudless and the barometer predicts fair weather. It will be a beautiful Bayfield summer day.
Local raspberries are ripe, as are the first blueberries . The second crop of sweet cherries is in at Apple Hill Orchard. The first crop were Cavaliers, the second crop Lapins. Both are good eating sweet cherries, although not as large and sweet as the Bing cherry, which is not quite hardy here. Actually I like the Lapins better than the Bing. Apple Hill expects to pick about 10,000 pounds of cherries this season, and all will be sold locally.
Which brings up the whole concept of “buy local” campaigns. In theory supporting local businesses is a nice idea and of course we do. But as a politically correct concept, pushed to the limit (as such things invariably are in our society) it is a very damaging practice. After all, if everyone, everywhere, only bought locally produced food there would be no trade in food products, and each locality or region or nation would produce only enough for its own markets, and there would be no surpluses of fruit, vegetables, meat, grains, etc. When drought or disease or political chaos or war created shortages in one region there would be starvation because of a shortage of food commodities and the means to market and distribute them. Historically this has always been the case, and it is only within my own lifetime that mass starvation has become a rare occurrence.
All this seems like the most rudimentary economic common sense, but it is surprising how scarce a commodity common sense has become.
So the next time some politically correct shopper looks askance at you because you do not happen to “buy local,” tell him you are doing your share to prevent starvation.
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