Work has a subscription to USA Today which published 3, count 'em 3, stories about this:

Consumer Reports has found a growing level of concern among Americans about the safety of our food and the veracity of what's in it, as one food scandal after another rockets out of China.


Rather than taking this moment of public dialog to discover where our food comes from and what it goes through to get to us, 83% of us have, in true American fashion, found an easier way around the problem: We'll only eat American!


Except. Except until we realize that junior will have to give up her bananas, senior his January tomatoes, and sis her beloved Mexican avocados. Oh well. Perhaps we'll limit ourselves to the Americas.


But what of our Italian risotto, our imported cheese? Most of us have forgiven the French enough to eat Brie and drink wine, after all. Maybe we can limit ourselves to the Western Hemisphere. Europeans put so much stock into their Denominations of Origin that surely they're careful about their safety practices.


Then someone informs us that most of our shrimp is from Vietnam and Thailand, that 16% of our ground beef--our hamburger meat, for crying out loud!--comes from China, and we're back where we started.


If American politicians can be frequently and justifiably accused of abusing the slippery slope fallacy in their arguments, perhaps it's because their constituents are comfortably familiar with the process through reductionist solutions like the one above. We're particularly adept at employing simplistic, exclusionary methods when it comes to our diets. In the 1980s, we shunned fats, in the '90s it was sugar, and the new millennium saw Americans abandon carbohydrates, one of four basic food molecules, and a time-honored energy powerhouse, particularly for the poor, who couldn't afford the average American's meat- and fat-rich diet.


This crisis has activists calling for country-of-origin labels on all food, a good idea that's already in practice in multiple other markets, including the EU. Unfortunately for us, many of these markets operate with the ethos that businesses exist to provide something of value to a community, where we in America are an unenviable circumstance: the private citizen has less power over his or her representatives than a company that has its headquarters and the vast majority of its fiscal contribution in someone else's jurisdiction. Indeed, even private groups of citizens dream of holding the kind of influence that corporations have, especially at the federal level. We live in a society where we are expected to provide something of value to business, be it cheap labor, money that we can't afford to spend, or captive audiences of future consumers.


If either house of Congress were to consider a bill requiring country-of-origin labels, it would almost definitely pass, get signed into law, and trumpeted in the media. It would probably also undergo the requisite gutting of standards that we witnessed in the assignment of organic labels. We can assume that manufactured food would be exempt from any labeling standards for many reasons. First, much of this food is produced with commodities, which are grown or made all over the globe and are indistinguishable from one country to the next. Second, no marketer worth his or her MBA wants to admit this to the public. Third, no accountant wants to change this practice, as it makes manufactured food vastly cheaper than less-processed food.


A more realistic solution for the individual American is to do precisely what we tell our children not to: become picky eaters. We can insist on knowing not only where our food came from, but how it was grown, by whom, when vegetables were picked and fish caught, and any of a host of other variables that may be important to a given consumer at a given time. We will undoubtedly run into resistance, but particularly in and around urban areas, it's more than feasible for consumers to refuse to do business with any purveyor who won't research or supply whatever information they want.


An obvious place to start is a local farmers' market; not only can we find fresh, often certified-organic produce, we can meet farmers and learn more about what the local ecosystem produces from season to season, but we can learn what is available in the off-seasons, when farmers' markets close. Those of us with children can demonstrate the links between food and farming, making the process of choosing what to eat more concrete and less bewildering for the next generation.


Much of the environment that we live in has the potential to be toxic in ways beyond our control. I cannot insist that someone clean up the Chattahoochee or any of Atlanta's other water sources, nor can I force my fellow drivers to use biodiesel to clear the smog over my city. I can't rid the old building I live in of lead paint, or asbestos, if it were a problem. But three times a day or more, I can make a conscious decision to ingest something that can help my body or hurt it, something that has been produced in such a way that it adds value to the local community through increased topsoil, a family's income, cleaner water, more available resources--the whole host of benefits that come from sustainable agriculture.


Many times, when I eat out or at work, I fail to do this. But at home, I cook for myself, for Honey, for friends and family who I love and cherish, and it's these meals that I insist give back rather than deplete. When we eat, we have the potential to nourish far more than ourselves, and we should insist that our food give us the chance to do so at every opportunity.