I have been thinking about this a lot.  Not just related to food, but related to any product.

Consider this.  Recently I bought and read a book called ‘Love And Terror On The Howling Plains Of Nowhere’ by author Poe Ballantine.  A publisher’s review can be found here for those interested in finding out more about it – http://hawthornebooks.com/catalogue/love-and-terror-on-the-howling-plains-of-nowhere

The book was written by an American and published by an American publishing house.  It was printed in China on paper that may have come from anywhere, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia . . .

It was sent back to the US for distribution and I bought it online from The Book Depository who sent it to me from the UK.  It cost a little over twenty bucks with free postage.

The point is that this single book has travelled around the world racking up mileage along the way, all of which costs money and all with a cost to the environment.

Now food is like that as we buy oranges from California, pineapples from Asia, and apples from New Zealand and millions of tons of processed foods from China.  It has become so absurd that as the makers of the video ‘The Economics Of Happiness’ point out, we are seeing “apples sent from the UK to South Africa to be washed and waxed, then shipped back to British supermarkets; tuna caught off the coast of America, flown to Japan to be processed, then flown back to the US”.

In fact any product is like that as we trundle down the path to globalisation and I reckon it’s time to put a stop to it.  In Queensland, according to the Qld Government, there are 403,000 small businesses employing about half of all Queenslanders.  The money we spend locally goes back into the community.  And I put my money where my mouth is by having my website built by a local, my computer repaired by a local and I shop locally as much as possible.  I’m also involved in a local initiative to start a ‘community farm’ to work towards a food independence, at least as far as fresh veges and fruits are concerned.

Let’s all buy locally where we can.

I have just ordered a book and I have stolen the title for the name of this post.

The book, named ‘Death Sentence’, is by Don Watson and is about, as the title suggests, the death of the sentence – http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/don-watson/death-sentence-the-decay-of-public-language-9781740512787.aspx – or, as the sub-title puts it, ‘the decay of public language’.

Maybe later I will write about the book (I haven’t got it yet) but I wanted to comment on the appalling state of our language, in particular the appalling spelling of it and more to the point the spelling used on the internet, where many of us do much of our reading.

I understand that there are those who have learning difficulties and so this is not targetted at those who have genuine problems with learning our complex language, rather it is aimed at those who are too lazy; who can’t be bothered getting it right.  And with the availability of spell checking technology there isn’t much of an excuse to get it so terribly wrong.  Poor language/spelling is, to me, a breach of contract with your reader, assuming you want one.  It makes your reader do all the work that you ought to have done when you wrote your message.

Looking to buy a car has revealed such blunders as “tidey” for tidy, “ruber” for rubber, “duel” for dual, “veihcle” for vehicle, “moter” for motor and “coluor” for colour.  And that was in just a few minutes of looking.  All of these mistakes have a red line under them as I type which ought to give the writer a clue.  Unless they are clueless of course.

I went to school a while back, it’s true.  And we had spelling hammered into us (for which I am thankful), but in just a couple of generations, with the support of real-time spell checking, we lost the plot.  How come?