Spencer Elliott came back to the podcast today to talk about the “buy local” marketing phenomenon. He started all of this out with a little anecdote designed for my neck of the woods …
Little could he know that Milo’s has become a too-important part of my routine these days. It’s a little bit of home. Indeed, the stuff is brewed just eight miles from where I grew up. I can plot out three routes from A to B without thinking about it and there was a time I could have probably driven the thing with my eyes closed.
I’ve never done that, because I drink tea and that keeps me awake. It’s an expression. But, then, so is the phrase “Buy local” and its many derivatives. The point is a clever marketing of something here at home. Makes you feel good. Propping up the local economy. Sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, as Elliott explained.
But, he said, there are no tea plantations in Alabama. Fair enough, but I’m assuming that water — and I don’t know anything about their actual production — ran down Muscoda Hill and directly into some fanciful and terrific tea cistern they have on site.
Why, look, they put it right out front!
Obviously that’s a drainage system. In point of fact the taste comes from the red clay, it gets into everything else, may as well be mixed with the international tea leaf blend.
Anyway, fun show. It wasn’t all about tea. I tried to ask of him all of the questions a shopper might ask. To do that I imagined myself at a grocery store, standing next to a guy who knew about this stuff and was ready to answer every nagging thought and worry and concern I had about things from produce to artisanally stirred, fair trade stomped, sustainably green LEED certified, child labor law obeying, down the street pasta sauce some fictitious grandma made, buongiorno!
But it’s interesting how we are attracted to that, isn’t it? I had a family member, years ago, that made these fried fruit pies. This aunt of mine would go door-to-business door selling them to the local shops and they’d put them right up on the counter and they sold like, well, hot fruit pies. It was a thing in her hometown for a little while, and that’s probably all it ever needed to be. But you would have sworn they tasted better just because, maybe, you knew her, or you’d heard of her name, or because the merchant told you it was the lady who lived over by the river, you know the one. But everything is local if the world gets small enough, anyway. That local appeal might not be entirely instinctive, but it’s got to be fairly close.
Instinctively, I know this is the wrong time of year for this:
This morning it wasn’t even in the forecast, now we’re going to be in a squall for an hour or two. I don’t even know what a squall is, really. Turns out it isn’t about volume at all. Nor is it about the weather hating me in mid-March.
Stuck to the ground, but not anything to worry over. No need rush out to the grocery store. All the local stuff has already been picked over anyway.
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