Time to get serious....

Believe me, nobody wants to do that less than me.
But, the circumstances are beyond my control.

Check out this article from Monday:

Long road from farm to fork worsens food outbreaks

Now, I have to wonder about that.  Cuz really, most everything sold in the produce isle at the store I can grow fairly well in my backyard.  There are some exceptions, cantaloupe not being one of them.  Why is getting food from the farm to the table such a problem?  We used to be pretty good at it.  Since the turn of the last century, when we started checking and regulating things we've kept a large portion of our nation fed and healthy for a very long time.  I haven't checked the history, but I don't recall too many tainted food stories before a few years back.
So, what happened?  Last century we had a good system in place and most people got good, fresh food in their local markets, and this century we can't manage it?  Really?

"Increasingly with agribusiness you have limited producers of any given food, so a breakdown in a facility or plant or in a large field crop operation exposes thousands because of the way the food is distributed," says Dr. Brian Currie, an infectious disease specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

Ah yes, now I understand.
Big corporate farms are not a good thing?  What a shocker.
It used to be, back in the day of mom and pop, those much maligned oldsters.  There were a lot of small, independent farmers.  These farmers traded directly with the consumers of their areas, or at least no more than 3, maybe 4, levels of local middle men.  Things moved pretty quickly from the field to dinner plate.  Since their were lots of smaller farms people grew a wide verity of things locally to offer to the market and you could pretty much get whatever you wanted.  We operated on that model for decades and with a little oversight and tweaking here and there it worked, and people didn't die.
Now with the advent of large corporate farms things that are grown down the street are getting shipped half way round the world, and the land around you grows 1, maybe 2, different crops.  Things have to be shipped farther and farther, and people are getting sick.
We really need to rethink this system.  I, for one, will seek more and more to get my food from local sources.  I already deal with small, local businesses for some of my provisions.  It's time to see what else I can find.
I would really like to know where my food has been.