Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Probably because I am related to lesbian hippy urban farmers, and have some lesbian hippy urban farming tendencies myself, I find myself thinking a lot about local food. Specifically, where to get it and if I can afford it (depends on the week). But unfortunately, to misquote someone famous and dead, one cannot live on bread alone. So I think a lot about the ability to purchase other things locally. Or in the case of towels and other linens, the lack thereof.
Yeah, I could pop over to the bureau of urban living and pick up some Detroit made soap with a cute little map of Detroit on the bottom, but how come no one is buying fabric in bulk and making sheets and pillowcases with a huge map of the city on it? Or making raw organic cat food from rabbits that live on some urban farm in the Corridor?
If I'm going to spend 30 bucks on fancy cat food (not the raw stuff, I could very well make that at home), why not have it feed back into the city and state economy? I bet tons of the same hipster/ hippy/artie folks who go to the Russel Bazzar have pets that eat Iams. Where is Iams even packaged and produced at? It sure as hell isn't here.
There is a little fact floating around the web, " If every Michigan household spent $10 each week on Michigan made food products, then $37 million dollars would be put back into the local economy on a weekly basis."
I'm assuming the same principle applies to other goods and services, right? Or does this little fact simplify our current economic crisis by spinning too much personal responsibility? More so, is my slight feeling of guilt for not doing as much as I could to directly support the local economy that supports me, justified?
aka: is spending the extra 15 bucks at the Dearborn Music vs. amazon store worth it?
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3 comments:
I just saw when i was at recycle here or now or whatever it's called on saturday, that they sell paper products there now. I'm not sure if they are made here or just made from recycled materials.
i would love if there was locally made pet food that wasn't a million dollars. maybe we should start making it, and we can peddle our pet food and cat toys in detroit.
detroit needs to learn to be more sustainable (i sort of hate that word), and not have to rely so much on the rest of the world for its resources.
I am always leary of anything that says so and so much money would be put into the local economy if such and such was done. Who actually recieves this money? How does it benefit people within a certain geographical and/or cultural space? I am leary of these statments mainly because they assume we have an economy that is based on an equal allocation of funds. We don't. So who would get that 37 million dollars each week? The farmer's? the places they spend their money at? Like, I don't know if it makes any sense. Ultimately, I think it is important to support local business and buy local, but this is not a liberatory or radical act. There will continue to be people who don't beneift, on a large level, from "buying local" and the shitty economic structure we have regardless of an economic crisis or not. Not to say i am apathetic to buying local. I thnk its good. I guess I am just saying that there has to be more than just "buying local."
Oh yea, GO GREEN. GOD CLUB IS NOW GREEN, duh. were so green. green that green its now in the fourth dimension of greenness. so send us money. supporting local green art by sending us lots of money each week is like putting 1 billion dollars into the local economy, that is if people send us 1 billion dollars each week. So yea, suck on that farmers.
hahahahahahaahahahahahahaha
"Going green" is pretty nausea inducing, as David has pretty blatantly articulated above, but I do think that Detroit is in a weird place right now for creating a sustainable resource of goods and services considering who its primary customers are. I know that when Eastern Market is open to the public on a large scale on Saturday mornings and early afternoons, it does incredibly well, but most of the people who benefit from this are from outside of the city, making their requisite "Detroit Weekend" trip that parallels along other activities such as attending sporting events at Ford Field and Comerica park as well as marginally less obnoxious pass times such as frequenting the opera house and the fox theatre for special events. These people ultimately get lumped into to the group of suburbanites who flock to local casinos for a few hours and invest all of their money there and spend much of their time strategizing how to avoid other areas of the downtown district because A: they are convinced there is nothing there to occupy their time as efficiently, such as an incredibly valuable group of art museums and B: a "crack head" might approach then and ask for some money.
This all leads me to believe that people from the suburbs view Detroit as this sort of theme park and I think that that attitude has been promoted by the city in the projects it has promoted and/or encouraged. If this is the case, we should probably call Cedar Point to ask how to most effectively build the worlds largest rollercoaster so that we can not only upstage the people mover but construct a piece of machinery so fantastical that all surviving middle class families can RUN (read: DRIVE) to see what CRAZY THINGS Detroit is doing now! Because, you know, we definitely need the press.
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