Heath Ceramics in California is benefiting from consumers’ interest in where their products come from.
Import bans are now in fashion, the free market feels a little more constricted and suddenly the point of origin matters.
Iraq placed an embargo on vegetable imports from countries like Turkey, Iran and Syria to boost its own farms. China tightened import standards on food, banning Irish pork. India prohibited Chinese toys. And Argentina increased licensing requirements on auto parts, textiles and leather goods, wrote The Times’s Mark Landler.
As the recession’s grip tightens and global trade shrinks, the need for security and the sense of territoriality seem heightened. Some countries are turning a discerning eye toward their own resources, looking to sustain themselves, and provenance now seems to matter in new ways.
“How products are made is on the consumers’ radar,” Reinier Evers, founder of Trendwatching.com, which tracks consumer habits, told The Times’s Tracey Taylor.
Some businesses are benefiting from this attention to “country of origin.” Heath Ceramics, a factory in Sausalito, California, does everything in house, from mixing clay to applying glazes to its ceramics, The Times reported. In 2008, Heath’s sales increased, wrote Ms.Taylor, and its owners told her that its “idiosyncratic way of doing things and its geographical roots could prove to be its salvation.”
Discovering those roots has become especially important when it comes to food. Concerns over food safety, quality and cost are driving consumers to seek out food that has traveled fewer kilometers and is traceable, Kim Severson wrote in the Times.
Large companies like Frito-Lay are taking advantage of the interest in origins by embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means, wrote Ms.Severson. “We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” says a farmer in a Frito-Lay ad, wrote Ms.Severson. “It’s a pretty good fit.”
Jessica Prentice, a food writer in the San Francisco Bay area, told Ms.Severson: “You know the locavore phenomenon is having an impact when the corporations begin coopting it.”
Some companies are letting consumers trace their own food on the Internet, wrote The Times’s Brad Stone and Matt Richtel. Tracking is no longer just for a lost pet or wayward child. You can follow your banana online, too.
A consumer can buy all-purpose whole wheat flour from the Stone-Buhr flour company in San Francisco, go to findthefarmer.
com, enter the lot code on the bag and ask the company’s farmers questions, the reporters wrote.
“The person who puts that scone in their mouth can now say, ‘Oh my God, there’s a real person behind this,’ ” Read Smith, who runs a farm and cattle ranch in Eastern Washington, told The Times.
Bananas can be followed on Doleorganic.com, which shows information on farms in Central and South America. Askinoisie Chocolate in Missouri can be traced on its Web site to cocoa bean farms in Mexico, Ecuador and the Philippines. Customers at Waitrose, a British supermarket chain, can watch videos about the farmers of potatoes, coconuts and pineapples, wrote Mr.Stone and Mr.Richtel.
People are digging deeper and paying attention to details. Whether it’s just curiosity or the economic crisis that has compelled them to want a little more personalization or something more than the superficial, Ms.Prentice said: “The ‘where’ question is really important.”
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