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Last an outbreak of E. coli bacteria in California- grown organic spinach that left three dead and hundreds sick shone the national spotlight on the question of where food comes from. Most produce people eat, organic or not, travels thousands of miles to reach the shelves of their local supermarket. The journey exacts a huge toll on the environment as refrigerated tractor-trailers packed with green tomatoes and bananas crisscross the country, burning diesel and spewing pollution and greenhouse gas. And the potential for unsanitary handling and nutrient depletion exists at every stop along the way.

According to statistics in Brian Halweil's Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, fruits and vegetables now travel between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to market, "an increase of roughly 20 percent in the last two decades." And that's just the produce within the U.S. Halweil says that 898 million tons of food are shipped around the planet each year, four times the amount that was shipped in 1961.

"It's amazing that you can buy organic food at WalMart" says Jen Maiser, the founder of the blogs Eatlocalchallenge.com and Lifebeginsat30.com."But some of us really wanted a better handle on our food. Now organic is so corporate." Living in the Bay Area of California with plenty of access to year-round farmer's markets, Maiser is a self-described "locavore" (others, including vegetarian cookbook guru Deborah Madison, refer to themselves as "localtarians"). They are at the forefront of a movement that stresses eating local as a way to reconnect with one's food.

The Not-So-Super Supermarket

Walk into any American supermarket and it's like entering a food Mecca. Aisle upon aisle of choices, approximately 45,000 in total, from cereals to cereal bars, canned soup to soup mixes, instant rice to rice and beans, chicken halves to chicken wings, soda to juice to energy drinks. And always right near the entrance sit the glistening mounds of produce: the green leafy lettuce and blemish-free cucumbers lightly spritzed every few minutes; the shiny apples and succulent-looking strawberries, even in the dead cold of winter. According to local eating advocates, all those perceived choices are little more than illusion.

Michael Pollan's runaway bestseller, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, taught readers that much of what's sold in the supermarket under the guise of unique food items can be traced back to a four-letter word: corn. "A chicken nugget," writes Pollan, "piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn [because that's what the chicken eats], of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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