There's some fine lines that people cross.
I bet that if Whole Foods was to try to open a store here that the locals would try to do a 'buy local' thing to keep them out.
Like the lines between having tastes, preferring your tastes to others', denigrating others' tastes, ridiculing others' tastes, and regulating others' tastes.
Many of the folks I meet here are working on ways to erase that final distinction so as to more completely achieve a sort of 'organic' fascism, as I understand it.
Now, I personally enjoy a glass of wine with my BBQ (and plenty of salt), and if it's an outdoor restaurant, I'd even consider a cigar. Those are my tastes.
There are teetotalers who don't eat meat (or salt) or smoke, just like Adolph Hitler. While I personally find this preference state peculiar and provably outside of the norm for human cultures, I don't find it objectionable.
But when they take that to the next level, and start mis-representing fact in order to sway people (when it becomes a religion, in other words), it's objectionable.
Meat is not 'murder', it's 'slaughter'. Even most killings of humans isn't really even murder, if you noticed. It's extremely presumptive and rude of someone to utter that phrase, since it's terribly offensive (and meant to be so).
Likewise, it's extremely presumptive and rude of someone to take any kind of offense at someone standing on a street with cars going by smoking anything. A human simply can't make the level of exhaust that a motor vehicle can, and the exhaust of a car is *far* more deadly.
And it's terribly presumptive to make all one's dishes w/o the use of the common flavoring item that other countries use with relish, salt. Especially french fries. That has got to be the most brain-dead presentation I've come across, and it's pretty common here.
It's not rude, but it's not tasty.
I tried another local shop for lunch on Friday. Their meat was a bit peculiar tasting (sour and not too salty for ham). I noted that the 'extras' on the menu were mainly high-water content items, and then, I realized what it is that many folks here really want to subsist on: bread and water.
They just want the water encapsulated inside a little crunchy green package.
The more I consider the whole question of 'buying locally' (which I do still try to do from time to time), I have to wonder whether I'm beating a dead horse. For the opportunity to experience 'local flavor', I paid almost double what I'd pay at a fast food joint, and got less tasty food. Fast food sucks, generally (and Ukiah's no exception to that), but it's cheap.
There's no decent pizza or italian in this city, the Mexican is all some variant of 'Cali-Mex' (read, these people are more scared of peppers than of salt), and most of the oriental foods here are so heavily doused with oyster sauce that it's rare that I even go to get other dishes in-house, due to the smell. I can't imagine what those folks who go to the places with raw fish are getting (leastways, the ones I've been to that featured both raw fish and that smell).
For those of you who haven't actually experienced this, (fresh) raw fish smells like meat (exactly--save for a faint sea-salt taint). Go to the water, get one, take the skin off, and take a whiff if you don't believe me.
Bad fish (fish that should be used to fertilize corn, for example) smells like fish.
Buying locally only works when local production is at least passably an equivalent to the import.
That's why the American auto industry has gone down the tubes, if you hadn't noticed.
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