Eat Locally!

Considering the impossibility to think about italian politics in this sad period (the recent news are totally out of my modest intellectual reach) I do want to give complete space to the local dimension.

We all can do real politics not through conventional political parties (whose activity is a complete failure) but rather with our everyday choices, our habits, our lifestyles and models we present to our children. Making politics means mainly to show our capability to "cooperate" and "working together" through associations, groups, committes of any kind: even the more apparently simple or banal association may act as a critical contribution for the reconstruction of a sense of community the present Fiction Ideology is trying to erode.

"Politics" in Italy is likely to be a sort of unavoidable desease of our times or a collateral effect of this kind of modernity (like a social diabetes): thus I believe it's better to focus our efforts and attention in something we can concretely do in our homes, street, district, village, city or town: catch your broom and work!

Live locally and more space to this local dimension.

I have found quite interesting the results of a survey conducted in Italy about the diffusion of local food products: about 54% of the contacted people prefer local products rather than large companies' food and the percentage of italians buying food directly in a farm is progressively increasing. More info (in italian) about this survey may be found here.

All this evidences that an awareness about the unsustainability of many consumption models (among which food consumption models) is finally taking place also in Italy.

Eat locally means to renounce to buy food traveling in trucks for long distances: these trucks pollute the air we breath and consume a lot of fossil fuels

Eat locally means to support local economy and those producers working in the same area where we live

Eat locally means to support small producers operating ofter under the pressures of big distribution companies.

Eat locally means to buy often seasonal healthier products with better economic conditions for consumers and producers being the long chain of intermediaries eliminated or reduced.

Eat locally means to know who has produced the food we eat.

Of course all this does't imply a conflict with big production and distribution companies but acknowledging a critical importance also to these forms of production and social relations.

In brief, it could be a paradox, but also when eating we can do "politics"...