Local business

In July 2013, I made a business trip to Montana, in the USA, where only 1 million people live on 380,000 sq. km - an area larger than Germany. This used to be Plains Bison country. Once north America was home to at least 25 million bison - a number reduced to fewer than 600 by the end of the 19th century due to hunting and cattle ranch expansion. There are still no resident wild bison in Montana, with only around 1,000 in managed herds. Large herbivores are important to maintain the ecology of prairies, and cows of the right breeds can also fulfill this function in areas populated by humans. However, in Montana, with over 2.5 million beef cattle, the ratio of cows to bison is around 2,500/1 - not a good balance! Hunting bison was made legal again in Montana in 2005. In our meeting room a dead bison looked down on us whilst we calculated value sharing - very unnerving.

To get to Montana from Europe, one has to transit through Seattle in Washington State. I went to a local market, where I saw an emphasis on local food.

Posters above each market section showed the local people responsible for the produce. If you look at their surnames, you can see that the area must have been originally been settled by Dutch,  German and Scandinavian stock.

I remember first reading about the U.S. 'local food' movement in an article in Time magazine in 2007. Local food is an alternative to buying globally sourced food from supermarkets - with the aim to improve local economies and communities, avoid the wastage of transporting food over long distances, and reduce potential environmental degradation and animal abuse from large-scale industrial producers. There is certainly a joy in seeing where one's food comes from, knowing how it is produced, and having a relationship with the people that produce it. However, local is not necessarily aligned with 'organic', as local farmers usually don't have the investment capability or market access to meet stringent production requirements.

I took a boat ride with my colleague Sergi. Whilst he played with his WhatsApp, I gazed out to sea. 

Bobbing on the water were rafts of Rhinocerus Auklets (Cerorhinca monocerata). They are only found along the coast of the northern Pacific - another local speciality.