Down at my local shop, I am regularly discouraged: wilting fruit and veg and watery bacon to one side, row upon row of pre-cooked meals lining dusty shelves on the other.
Throw in a blast of strip lighting and a bored shop assistant, and it's little wonder that most customers only seem to pop in for an anaesthetic top up: fags, booze, tabloid gossip and dreams of lottery riches.
Happy shoppers they are most emphatically not.
This regular discouragement got me thinking about why we actually work in the first place.
Work to live or live to work?
The most prevalent (and most widely denied!) answer - to make money - was soon ruled out: it is short-termist, sickens the planet and stretches the gap between rich and poor. Never, we might paraphrase, have so many been so dissatisfied with so much.
E F Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, gives us this answer. "The function of work is threefold:
to give man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties;
to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task;
and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence."
What then are man's faculties? Perception, rational thought, cognitive development? Maybe. But for me, the ability to consciously give and receive love are the most impressive and rewarding of human faculties.
How do we learn how to love, then, through our work?
Food for the body, food for the soul
If we look at one of our most basic industries, farming and food production, we see, very neatly, that we have a golden opportunity to fulfil our spiritual needs whilst also seeing to the most basic of our material needs.
The thoughtful and co-operative production, distribution and preparation of food could teach us the virtues of loving kindness for others and the environment, increased alertness, concentration and trust, nutrition and good health.
Instead, we have automated and industrialised food production and distribution to save us time. Chickens come from Thailand, apples from New Zealand, spinach from Spain; even the turnips in my local shop in Somerset come from Norfolk.
Organic, labour intensive farming provides smaller financial returns but the gain in knowledge, experience and well being would focus our minds on Schumacher's reversal of our understanding of the function of work.
How do we persuade the customer that it is worth paying more for produce grown in this way?
Right thinking, right livelihood, right local
Cheap food was promised to a hungry electorate after WWII. We now pay the cost in ravaged countryside, diseased livestock, ill-health and social dysfunction.
A network of local shops, selling local produce to local customers would slowly persuade them that the retail price of food bares little relation to the actual cost. If you are able to see where produce comes from, if you perhaps know some of the farmers, and can see how they produce their energy, would the penny start to drop?
All products would show clearly how far they came from and, to emphasise the system, where practical, the nearer a product's origin, the lower its price.
To offset these subsidies, customers wanting luxuries from farther afield would pay inflated prices. A network of local produce shops could each share information on their produce (Scottish Smoked Salmon, Cornish Ice Cream, Somerset Cider).
Orders direct to the supplier, still priced according to your distance, could also be made by mail order. If the network reached sufficient size, more regular deliveries to a particular local shop could be made. A web directory listing all suppliers would mirror the physical network.
There would be no need to stop at national borders. The movement could and should be international, offering individuals the chance to share knowledge and learn about peaceful interaction and co-operation through exchange holidays, work placements and trade itself. A secular version of the medieval monastic network perhaps?
The aim would be to offer a true 'super' market where grocer, fishmonger, baker, butcher, and ironmonger would all have their own areas. The attraction over the existing giants would be better quality, increased honesty, environmentally sound products, friendly service and knowledge that more of what you spend would get to the producer.
From produce and services to craft and art
Each shop would also publish a directory advertising trustworthy local services, for which payment could be accepted in kind: plumbing for legal advice, massage for M.O.T., beauty treatment for vetinary services.
To encourage a local, community feel to the shop, there would also be a café, gallery space for exhibitions, and where permitting larger facilities for local classes, meetings, seasonal entertainments and so on.
Location, location, location
In rural areas, we increasingly drive to the supermarket, park the car, shop and even seek our entertainment on the edge of towns. However, a true 'out of town' location could be encouraged by placing community stores such as these with ample parking, closer to farms (vegetable, fish, arable or livestock) or other relevant sites (a mill, a wind farm, a smithy?), yet close to major motorways or main roads.
Families might go shopping together, visit the site itself, and generally make it more of a day out. Customers could see at first hand how many other local resources were used in making their products: cups of mint tea in the café, brewed from water drawn from a well and mint grown in the herb garden. Local energy generation (solar, turbine etc) could also make interesting 'visitor' attractions.
Individual choice, individual responsibility
Although we have the luxury of choosing what we eat and drink, we have no idea how to nourish ourselves.
Thoughtful production, distribution, retail and cooking of food could remind us how to do so. If we get closer to the source of production, we will see at first hand the consequences of our individual choices and learn to take responsibility for them.
Further reading:
'Buddhist Economics' An essay by E. F. Schumacher:
http://pears2.lib.ohio-state.edu/FULLTEXT/JR-ADM/schumaa.htm
Catholic Worker Society:http://www.cjd.org/index.html
Ken Wilber: Sex, Ecology and Spirituality
Author: benjolliffe@onetel.net.uk