Weird ramble. Cobblers, bakers and veggie gardens.

Once, people lived in tiny houses with large gardens filled with vegetables, fruit and herbs. Now we live in vast houses and buy our vegetables fruit and herbs shipped in from other countries. When transport again becomes too expensive to do that, food will have to be produced locally and prices will have to rise. Simple sustenance will again be valuable. Derelict fruit trees that now spend Autumn standing on a skirt of their rotting, fallen fruits will instead be pruned, netted against birds, fenced against raiders and eagerly harvested.

Ah, peak oil. Thy potential ramifications are many.

Re-emergence of villiage life is one such prospect. Easy and affordable transport has seem massive centralisation and economies of scale, and the drainage of populations from smaller hamlets into larger towns, thent he larger towns drain away into the smaller cities, which fill and flow over onto the remnants of the derelict villages, immersing the bluestone churches and red-brick halls in a sea of cheek-by-jowl McMansions, the inhabitants of which rely on bread from supermarkets supplied by distant bakeries whose flour is supplied by yet more distant flour-mills whose grain is supplied by far-flung growers from all points of the compass.

Local production is such a strange term to contemplate these days.

If all that transport is not cost effective, local shops will sell bread made from flour sourced as nearby as possible, made from flour sourced as nearby as possible, made from grain sourced as nearby as possible.

Shoes would be a better example. People would not be able to go to BigW and buy a pair of Chinese import sneakers for ten dollars. The cost of getting them here would make them unreasonably expensive. So there will be locall made shoes again. Possibly very locally made, as if people are walking more due to expense of transport, a cobbler could get very busy very quickly in a heavily populated area. (Secondhand may become more expensive as fashion would be less important than functionality and affordability. Who cares if it's last year's shade of mauve if it fits comfortably, and a new, cobbler made pair of shoes will set you back weeks wages?)

Blah. Weird wild ramble. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.