Swap meat

Well, not really meat. More like fruits and vegetables and dairy and eggs.

As I was driving home last week, I heard a story on NPR about a swap meet in Canton, NY. People get together to exchange home-canned goods from the garden and such. Think of it as a microcosmic example of the "comparative advantage" principle that's always used to justify economic globalization. In this case, it justifies ecologic localization. Or something.

The reality, of course, is that if you have a large number of kitchen-gardeners in an area, different gardens will give differing yields. One person will have more zucchini than they can eat (OK, a lot of people will have more zucchini than they can eat!), while someone else will have too many tomatoes and a third person will have beans coming out of their ears. (Why they put beans in their ears in the first place is beyond me -- my mother always told me not to do that.)

Now, during growing season, swapping a little of this for a little of that is an ongoing practice. But by late fall or early winter, everyone's put up (canned) everything that's worth eating, and the serious bartering can begin. As it was described, the main rules were that you could only bring your own products, and that no cash was to change hands.

Keeping cash out of the system means there are no tax implications -- by definition, an arms-length transaction is an even trade, so no income is generated. And restricting participants to their own produce keeps the brokers (and, in a larger implementation, the speculators) out of the loop.

The risk, of course, is that someone else hasn't done a good job of canning. But safe canning of fruits and vegetables is hardly difficult -- your grandmother did it every year. And it sounded like the organization which organized the swap meet also held local clinics to teach canning technique.

This is the kind of event -- more common in the past than in the present -- which addresses a number of sustainability issues within its geographic area. It emphasizes local food, nutritious food, a variety of foods, and a sense of community (incredibly important in the long run). And it has the potential to make low-income livelihoods more sustainable -- as we hear more and more about the "new normal", sustainable low-income livelihood is taking on an increased significance.

The sustainability coordinator at St. Lawrence University was one of the folks interviewed for the radio piece (although her job position wasn't identified). This kind of event is a natural for campuses which encourage gardening, or which have campus farms, or which train folks for the food business. There's no better way of learning what you eat (and, thus, what you are) than to get involved in all parts of the production and distribution cycles. Additionally, a swap meet is a great model of both simple commerce and social interaction.

(By the way, meats do get swapped as well. Not at any event, but in one-on-one transactions between farmers. I swapped some turkeys for some grass-fed beef, recently. No hormones or antibiotics in either one of them, and each will be consumed within a couple miles of where they lived. Which is as it should be.)