>It's less cost effective (from a pure business perspective) Perhaps it's because we live in a rural area, but my kids and I talk about this a lot. For example

>It's less cost effective (from a pure business perspective) Perhaps it's because we live in a rural area, but my kids and I talk about this a lot. For example... our area is a major onion producer. But guess what? In our major national chain grocery store right now you'll find onions from Vidalia, Georgia - trucked from the other side of the country. Our area also produces a lot of wheat, that then gets shipped 4 and 5 hours away to two major cities with large commercial bakeries, who then put the loaves of bread on trucks and ship the bread back to our local stores. Now granted, those loaves of bread get sent to lots of other places too, so I'm not discounting that there may be an efficiency overall, but nonetheless there is a local irony... once upon a time every town in this area had a local butcher, baker, creamery, etc - and now instead we produce the raw produce here and it comes back to us as value-added good from elsewhere.