Local Food Movement: Changing The Way We Eat
The trend toward "Local Foods" is a necessary way for American's to deal with several crises at once. With the dangers of food contamination, bio-terrorism (terrorists attacking our food supply), the price of oil, the damage to the environment and the sustainability of small farms at stake, eating food that is grown locally is the best option for our food dollar.
Any assertions of our food supply being safe would be a tenuous idea at best. The e-coli contamination of spinach in 2006 that effected 193 people in 26 states and Canada, resulting in the death of a Wisconsin woman and left 98 people hospitalized.
The spinach recall that followed, as well as many other food scares in the last 2 years have shown the weakness of our food supply. Reliance on government agencies is a frightening proposition. "The safeguards are not in place to protect fruits and vegetables in the same way that they are for beef and Poultry," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food-Safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Irradiation of our foods is not a valid option, and as Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture is quoted as saying, "sterilized poop is still poop."
The comfort that we have taken for granted, that the food we eat is ingested by millions of other people as well, dwindles with each case of contamination. Food safety officials offer little reassurance; Jim Gorny, senior vice president of Food Safety and Technology, for the United Fresh Produce Association, says testing at plants would be burdensome and ineffective. "One hundred percent inspection is no way to run a food safety program". Instead, "They have to rely more on the producer and supplier to generate paperwork that shows that they're doing the right thing." says Ewan Todd head director of the National Food Safety and Toxicology center of Michigan State University.
Our current food system leaves us vulnerable to a myriad threats and is a crushing burden on our environment. If however this summer consumers visited the farmer's market they drive by on their way to the grocery store, or grew an apartment friendly crop like a tomato plant or herb garden, we might begin to reverse such unsustainable and unsafe practices. Buying food grown locally is the only rational solution to the ever expanding problem of food contamination and global warming.
Any assertions of our food supply being safe would be a tenuous idea at best. The e-coli contamination of spinach in 2006 that effected 193 people in 26 states and Canada, resulting in the death of a Wisconsin woman and left 98 people hospitalized.
The spinach recall that followed, as well as many other food scares in the last 2 years have shown the weakness of our food supply. Reliance on government agencies is a frightening proposition. "The safeguards are not in place to protect fruits and vegetables in the same way that they are for beef and Poultry," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food-Safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Irradiation of our foods is not a valid option, and as Carol Tucker Foreman, a former assistant secretary of agriculture is quoted as saying, "sterilized poop is still poop."
The comfort that we have taken for granted, that the food we eat is ingested by millions of other people as well, dwindles with each case of contamination. Food safety officials offer little reassurance; Jim Gorny, senior vice president of Food Safety and Technology, for the United Fresh Produce Association, says testing at plants would be burdensome and ineffective. "One hundred percent inspection is no way to run a food safety program". Instead, "They have to rely more on the producer and supplier to generate paperwork that shows that they're doing the right thing." says Ewan Todd head director of the National Food Safety and Toxicology center of Michigan State University.
Our current food system leaves us vulnerable to a myriad threats and is a crushing burden on our environment. If however this summer consumers visited the farmer's market they drive by on their way to the grocery store, or grew an apartment friendly crop like a tomato plant or herb garden, we might begin to reverse such unsustainable and unsafe practices. Buying food grown locally is the only rational solution to the ever expanding problem of food contamination and global warming.
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