How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back
By Ann Vileisis, excerpt from her book

Has it ever occurred to you just how odd it is that we know so little about what we eat? Each day we feast on cereal, bread, salad, soup, chicken, cheese, apples, ice cream, and more. Over the course of our lives, each of us has eaten thousands of different foods. We have tasted their saltiness and sweetness, crunched their crispness, chewed their fleshiness, swallowed them, and incorporated their nutriment into our bones.Yet despite this biologically intimate and everyday physical connection, most of us have little idea where our foods come from, who raised them, and what went into making them.

The absurdity of this situation struck me about ten years ago. The news was rife with stories about how large-scale food production harmed health and the environment:pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli had become more prevalent in meat and eggs raised under crowded factory-farm conditions; pesticides used to grow foods were contaminating drinking water and harming the health of farmworkers and their children; agricultural chemicals were causing declines in amphibian and bird populations; the cod fishery was collapsing; and the fungicide methyl bromide, used in growing strawberries, was even linked to the erosion of the earth's ozone layer.

I began to wonder, were these the berries and eggs that I bought? As I pushed my shopping cart through the supermarket aisles, questions rose insistently in my mind: How were my eggs raised? Who grew my tomatoes? Where did my fish come from? What about the milk? The colorful boxes, cans, and jars that had long appeared familiar and comforting now looked cryptic.

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