local: the icing of the cake

" Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it. What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing."

Writes Rob Hoskins in a recent blog post about construction, but the analogy is about food and it certainly applies well to food!
 
Earlier, it was the faraway spices and tea that marked luxury, and was largely reserved for the privileged. Today local, organic and artisanal foods are luxury, things just some people can "afford" - because other products are comparatively cheaper. The of free-range chicken, which was the only way to keep chicken 100 years ago, and still the normal way among rural poor - is now a luxury product.

It is also illuminating that the rich, who largely became rich from the profits from the globalised markets, are the ones that to the largest extent are buying the stuff from those producers who work in ways that are less compatible with a global market with endless competition.

Peak research? diminishing returns of complexity?

From Cassandra's legacy

the state of scientific research in the world seems to be a nice example of Tainter's interpretation of the diminishing returns of complexity. Tainter had devised his model to explain the fall of civilizations - he had mostly in mind the Roman Empire. His idea is that when civilizations face diminishing resources, they react by building up more and more complex structure to cope with the problem. But there is a diminishing return to complexity; these structures become burdens rather than solutions and help bringing down the whole system (a discussion of mine on Tainter's model can be found here).