Supporting local entities

My excuse for eating out.

Had to use a big word – entities – as couldn’t just say restaurants although in this case that is what triggered the blog. I also use one or two village bakeries, several other restaurants, a service station, the recycling center (well it is local and keeps my trash from traveling), and a wee bit further afield an agricultural center, McDonald’s (o.k. mainly for coffee), never mind that I have two of the chain grocery stores within 5 kilometers and a department store just a couple hundred meters beyond them.

Why go into town when I don’t have to?

But back to today’s “buying locally”. First I had a talk with myself about the grammar, most people say buying local, but as buying is a verb it really should have the adverb, or does “buying local” imply “buying from someone who distributes on a local level” – you can see the problems and quandaries that arise in my need to do it right. Secondly there was the problem of title. I first chose “the devil made me do it” but quickly realized that

• Why do we blame the devil? Where did the phrase originate? Why do I need to blame anyone?
• If one can blame the devil, one can also either blame a god or let said god take credit for our actions.  In light of recent events I quickly steered away from that whole “kettle of fish”.

  

Parenthesis: I think perhaps that I should just get on with it instead of taking all these side trips into philosophical questions.

Thirdly: so I was going to use “buying local” as my title, but that provoked the grammar debate so….

Now you know how I chose my title.

Are you any further ahead on the subject? No, but I had fun.

To make a rather convoluted and way-too-long, the devil-made-me-do-it blog, just before noon I checked to see what the daily menu was going to be at one of my favorite local

restaurants: (ah, ha “local buying” would have worked) Café des Marronniers. Upon seeing that the entry was a rucola and parmesan (rocket and parmesan as spell-check doesn’t like the rucola) salad followed by an entrecote with a three-pepper sauce, a braised tomato and their matchstick French fries, I knew where I was eating lunch.

Antonio’s warm welcome, the waiter and waitresses always smiling greetings of “it’s nice to see you” set the tone. Everything lived up to my high standards. Wasn’t my first meal there, won’t be my last.

I can even feel virtuous having supported a local entity. Now if I had walked (only a 15-minute walk, but the current excuse is that I only had an hour as the tiler had gone home for his lunch, but would be back) I could have also fulfilled some of the 10’000 steps that one is supposed to manage per day!

I encourage everyone to do most of their purchasing, eating, etc. in their own neighborhood. I can't be too dogmatic as of course my passion for travel destroys a lot of my gains in other areas: we do what we can.