Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Living La Vida Local,
or Confessions of a North American Mango Lover

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
September 24, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Americans, long ago described as “the lonely crowd,” are getting lonelier. We feel an acute sense of isolation. Our families and friends live all around the country or the world. Many of us, when we are ill, don’t have anyone nearby whom we know well enough to ask for a helping hand. Our isolation is dramatically reflected in studies such as the ongoing Duke-Arizona research conducted every two years, with its latest results published last spring, ¹ which show an ever-declining number of close connections in people’s lives. This most recent study indicates that the number of people we Americans can discuss important matters with now averages two. That isn’t enough.

While proposed solutions to our loneliness have ranged from “cut your commute time” to “stop holing up with your spouse and invite some friends over,” I have another to suggest. It is that we focus more on our local community in two connected ways: we buy our goods from local merchants and we eat locally-grown foods. In different ways they strengthen the interdependent web of which we are a part: the web of social relationships with other people, and the web of all beings and elements of the earth.

Let’s compare two shopping experiences, one increasingly typical, one increasingly less so.

You want to buy a Christmas stocking for your nephew. You go to Target, where you know you’ll have a wide selection and can buy one for a few bucks. It’s made in China by a woman who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, doesn’t know the significance of the symbols she’s gluing onto the felt: not the man in the red suit, not the little people with pointed ears, not the bow-tied teddy bear. She doesn’t know your nephew, or you. She doesn’t care who this is for or what its purpose is. She just wishes she was paid by the hour instead of the piece, and that she could earn enough to feed her family properly, and that her eyes would stop smarting and her back would stop aching.

The teenage boy at the counter at the store doesn’t own the company, not even a single share. He doesn’t even know where the owners live. (The answer is: all over the country, wherever stockholders are to be found, though the CEO lives in a midwestern suburb.) He has no investment in the success of the company, which shows in his attitude to the product and the customers. He might be proud of doing his job well, but he’s not proud of the product. Why should he be? It has nothing to do with him.

Some of the money you spend there goes to your local area: the net income of the minimum-wage workers and the higher-paid managers of the local store; the gasoline for local delivery fleets. But most of it is scattered around the country. When the people who direct the corporation make financial decisions, they will be thinking of the stockholders they serve, not about the people of the Bay Area. After all, they have stores all over. If they make a decision that’s bad for our area, like closing down a dozen stores, our pleas will have little effect on them.

Now imagine, if you can, a small store such as what used to be widely known as a “general store.” Maybe you used to shop in a store like that. Maybe you still do. The family that owns it knows you and you know them. They want to be good neighbors, and so they pay attention to the community’s needs in making their decisions, like whether to expand and where to move. They sell a little bit of everything, so you only have a few Christmas stockings to choose from. But all of them are handknit by local women — you recognize a name and realize you know the brother of one of them. One of them comes in with a new box of knits as you’re standing at the counter talking with the owner, who’s at the register. The knitter chats with you about your nephew and urges you to find her after Christmas and tell her how he liked it. When you leave, you haven’t just ticked off an item on your shopping list; you’ve shared something with a member of your community.

Are those two examples too extreme? I’ve experienced both, but we haven’t all lived in small towns in Vermont. So let me bring them a little closer together, closer perhaps to the choices that are offered us day to day here in the Valley. Let’s imagine that the stocking is still made in China by the same demoralized woman, but this time it’s shipped to that small, locally-owned store. You still know the owners. You still go in a couple of times a week, and chat with them. If you have a problem, you don’t call a manager over, or call a toll-free number of an internet-order company and get a bored employee who has never even seen the inside of the company warehouse, because she lives in another state or another country. One end of the transaction, at least, is planted in your local community. Already you’ve made connections that are hard to make at that big-box store with the high turnover and the bored workers.

Big, centrally located businesses have many advantages. But we all know what happens when they move into a local area with their discount office supplies, hardware, books, clothes … The local equivalents go out of business, and with them go all the social network that they had built up through years, sometimes decades, sometimes generations of serving that neighborhood. Away goes the beauty of human variation. Every bookstore in the same chain is the same. After maybe a nod to local authors with a special shelf, in rare instances, it doesn’t reflect the interests of the local franchisee, or his or her neighbors.

I’ll tell you a secret: if a book has been published and printed in Books in Print, Kepler’s can get it for you. They might not have it in stock, the way Amazon.com probably does, but if you can wait a week they’ll get it for you. I bet most of the time, the week’s wait is no problem at all. And the books they do have in stock, you can browse, you can meet your neighbors in the aisles and see someone from your church behind the counter. You’ll chat, and you’ll ask, “Have you ever read anything by this author?” And they’ll say “He’s great, and hey, if you like him, I bet you’ll love stuff by this woman too … ” And you’ll have woven the web a little tighter, a little closer. You might discover a book club, whose meeting time is posted up on the wall, and make real friends there. All because you took your own body to a local building and talked to other people face to face as you walked amongst the actual books. We’re concrete and physical beings, and our social connections flow from the places we live and the faces we see.

Even the brick-and-mortar chains can’t compare to locally owned, locally established businesses. Browse for one hour in Borders and one hour in Kepler’s and see what you think. Which one feels like it belongs to your community, and which one was mass-created to be installed in San Mateo, Hackensack, Atlanta, and Boise indiscriminately? Where do the profits go when you’ve handed over your money? Are you supporting your neighbors, or are you sending your money to a stockholder in Ohio, so that your neighbor gets poorer and poorer and has to move away before you even got a chance to know him?

When we shop locally we are investing in our own community: in ourselves, in our friendships. Ohio deserves investment too, don’t misunderstand me, and in a global consciousness we hold the fate of a Cleveland family and a Shanghai family as dear as that of a family in Redwood City. But the fact is that we lose something when we take the human interaction out of our business transactions, and what makes the difference is often simply distance. While the people we meet in local businesses may not turn into our best friends, the connections we form through the simple acts of shopping and chatting and buying there weave the network that makes a society, and each person in it, strong and happy.

The network isn’t just human, either. It encompasses the whole earth. It’s tempting to just get on the net and buy anything we want from anywhere at all. And pay the shipping, and forget that it takes jet fuel and gasoline and the rubber of truck tires to get us that one little item. Do you know how Federal Express ships? Everything goes through one central location: Memphis, Tennessee. If you want to ship something overnight from Palo Alto to Sacramento, it will be flown to Memphis, processed, and flown back. Not so bad when it’s just one envelope, but multiply it by all the shipping we do and it’s a lot of cargo holds full. So there is an enormous environmental impact to buying items from afar, as well as a social one.

Books and Christmas stockings have always been shippable from far away, but one thing that used to be almost invariably local was food. Food spoils fast, so what we ate was what grew nearby. Even in the early days of this country, people might buy their flour instead of milling it themselves, but it didn’t come from that far, because it was so expensive and it would start to go rancid. Then came refrigeration, and trains and trucks that could keep food chilled all the way across the country. Preservatives were developed to keep things “fresh.” Grains were bred to have less of the rich oils that make them delicious and nutritious, because the oils went rancid. Much better to take the flavor out from the start and gain shelf-life. Fruits were bred to look good and travel far, and taste and nutrition took a back seat. Tomatoes could be picked green and ripened in a factory. If you don’t know what we lost along the way, you only need to do one thing: pick a sun-warmed tomato from an organic garden and slice and eat it then and there. Diane, today’s Worship Associate, has already given eloquent testimony to what else we stand to lose, and gain, in human relationships with the people who grow and pick our food.

As shipping has gotten faster and customers (at least in California) have demanded better produce, the supermarket varieties have come closer in taste to locally-grown again, but the price we pay is devastating: the wrecking of our environment. The average meal has traveled 1,500 miles by the time it reaches our table. The sugar in the café across the street traveled many thousands of miles between the plantation and your coffee cup: it was flown from Hawaii, to California for processing, to New York to be put in the paper packets, and back to California. ² That’s a lot of jet fuel. For every calorie of energy we get from our food, it’s estimated we spent ten times that in fossil fuel to produce and transport it. Some things, like sugar, are tricky — though we could skip the New York step and at least get it direct from Hawaii, and of course we could use less sugar and more honey, which is easily raised right here in our backyards (our next-door neighbor in Mountain View had a hive and gave us a jar we’re still nursing). But most of our food can come from no more than a couple of hundred miles away, if we choose.

Now, as I said in my title, I’m not living my ideal on this point. My favorite fruit has been mangoes since the day in 1994 when I first tasted one. The World Cup was in the United States, and I was walking to a Colombia game through the international fair that blossomed all around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. A man was peeling and slicing mangoes with hands as fast and nimble as a pianist’s, selling little bags full of perfect slices. Never an adventurous eater, I decided to be bold for once and try a new fruit, and with the first bite I regretted that it had taken me so long to discover this food of the gods. It’s a lovely memory, and I continued to buy mangoes on the street in East LA, pleased to be supporting a local pushcart owner even though the fruit itself came from thousands of miles away. My friend in Tampa has a mango tree in her yard and reaches up and picks one whenever she wants, all season, but I’m afraid the ones I usually buy have been shipped far from their parent trees, whose roots are in pesticide-laden soil in Chile.

We don’t need to eliminate every non-local food, or shop only in locally-owned businesses. It’s not always possible to get what we need without going outside our local area, even in this Eden that is California. But when we reflect on what we really need, we may decide that the price we pay in environmental destruction and social isolation just isn’t worth the convenience of imported food and big chains — that in fact, these “convenient” choices are more than inconveniencing us as we try to live the life we value. They are undermining the very things we most long for: a beautiful and clean planet to live in and leave our grandchildren; a society where we feel connected and held.

And as we vote with our dollars and express our preferences with letters to producers, more local options will become available to us, and in the meantime, every change we make will help. Let me share with you one other eating experience. I grew up in New England, and fall apple season was a highlight. We would go to Blue Hills Farm in my hometown, whose outstanding geographical feature was indeed a series of blue hills, the most famous of which was the Sleeping Giant, which looked like a miles-high man who had lain down for a nap on his back. The farmers sold the apples, pears, and honey that they raised on that sloping land.

When I began living in California, I felt far from apple country, and the waxed, picture-perfect Delicious in the supermarket, bland in flavor and shipped from Washington, didn’t do anything to reawaken that experience. Then I went all the way to England, where I picked an apple from the tree on a friend’s homestead and ate its four bites’ worth as we walked. It came back to me what it was like to live amongst apple orchards. Was it possible that I’d been missing out on an opportunity? When I got back home I paid attention to the local markets, and lo and behold, November is apple season in California.

When I go to the market at this time of year, the mangoes call to me, and once in a while I buy one. But every time I go now, I buy apples, because they grow here on the land I walk every day. I’ve been trying varieties that are new to me: Cameo, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, all available from farms in California that are using methods that don’t exhaust the earth they depend on, but sustain it. Cameos are my new favorite, with a skin as beautiful as their flesh is tasty (hold up apple). The experience of eating these apples is made richer by the fact that they have come from Watsonville, instead of trailing gasoline fumes all the way from Chile. I meet the farmers who grow them, and learn about what it’s like to rise at sunrise to get the fruit to market, how the season is going, what varieties they’re trying out now, where the fruit first came from (did you know apples migrated here from Kazakhstan?). This little sphere connects me to the land I live on and the people I see every day. I’m on the trail of my favorite apple from back East, Empires — I know they grow happily here, and I’ll find an organic, local source soon.

And hey, maybe if I keep talking to my local markets and telling them what I’m waiting for, I’ll find a source for organic California mangoes.

We are not our own; we affect one another with what we do. We are not alone; we exist in what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “a network of mutuality.” When we carefully, deliberately build up the connections among us by the choices we make every day, we know that we are not alone, and are sustained. We plant relationships and we reap love, and support, and companionship. So may it be.

---

---