the locally made magic pudding

The Weekend Post (hardcopy) featured a story from our flamboyant King Parrot on the economic miracle of consuming more locally produced food. Now, Kitchenslut loves his local food when it is high quality or unique specialty produce typical of our region. However, the million dollar a week claim is sort of like our own locally produced magic pudding. Similar estimates proliferate among the websites of local food and environmental interest groups elsewhere, particularly in the USA. These all appear to imply that if everyone buys more food locally then everyone can be better off. can you see a problem here?  It also appears to imply some heroic economic multipliers which also imply some internal contradictions with the basics of economcs.

KS will take up some of the economics of this later over at loose change rather than here .......