Take a look at this article www.scribd.com
The Great Transition Navigating Social Economic Ecological Change in Turbulent Times

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Take the euros, they LOVE their food. When you think of France or Germany, you probably think of beer, wine and food. You probably don't think of huddled masses eating turnips.

They don't go to supermarkets. Supermarkets are for buying baby cereal, jam, or cheap beer and wine. People might visit the supermarket once a month.

What they have is instead are markets. People visit the market almost daily. Most of the produce is local but you can get fruit and vegetables from all over Europe. There are fresh flowers - cheap. There are musicians and chalk drawings. In the fall there are local wines (everyone stocks up in the fall).

The bakery is another daily stop. Milk comes from the local dairy. Eggs come directly from the farm in barnside vending machines (!). The local butcher slaughters local animals.

Meat is much more expensive and once or twice a week there might be a meatless dinner - but they DO test for mad cow disease. Local sausage and cheese = cheaper and infinitely better than ours. Fast food is bratwurst from a street vendor. There is no monolithic chain of bratwurst vendors so they buy from the local butcher like everyone else.

Regular restaurants abound, food is relatively cheap (of course they get all their ingredients at the market but beware of horse meat - there are no cheap steaks!). Dinner is a 2 hour affair with appertif and digestif and endless talk.

Europeans have made great strides towards sustainability even with a higher population density and fewer resources than North Americans and their health is better. You can't say their quality of life is lacking, either. Who wouldn't like to be swedish? Yet we make sustainability sound like such a dreary thing :.?

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FDA rules are such that MSG is only labeled MSG if it is 99% or more in content. That means that the over 75 different "blends" are touted on labels as being MSG free. MSG is an excito-toxin and a flavor enhancer, as well as, being known to promote obesity. In addition, it is used as a fertilizer on high water content fruits and vegetables such as strawberries, tomatoes, celery, etc.

As a result of the use of this poison in virtually ALL processed foods. The FDA is part of the problem in allowing such a thing in our foods, however, the Food Industry is just too powerful. They say, if you can imagine, that it is not "proven" that MSG is a cause of anything, however, they do acknowledge sensitivities. Well, I have kidney disease, 2 others in my family have celiac, fortunately, I'm smart enough to figure out how to feed my family. REAL FOOD is the key. BUT, it's a lot more work to cook everything from scratch, including ketchup, spaghetti sauce, chicken broth (without flavoring). Is it worth it? Yes, but, it's getting people to eat that way that wil take a lot of work. You can have some convenience but it's the upfront work to CAN foods or freeze extra portions to help you out on the back end.

For a list of names that MSG goes by, go to truthinlabeling.com. I can personally attest to the accuracy of the list as I have a canary in the food mines in my family that gets extremely sick with this ingredient.

In addition to poor food, please also address plastics as part of the problem and the case of irreversible obesity as a result of pthalates. Remember when our food came in waxed paper or glass containers? I long for those days!

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See this "ancient" video from 60 Minutes on MSG. It was no different in 1992 than in 2009!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=599381265368100582&ei=
F7n3SPyNApnWqAPo9a0E&q=msg+%2260+minutes%22 No MSG (60 Minutes - 1992)

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Buy local, shrink the distance food travels, save the planet. The locavore movement has captured a lot of fans. To their credit, they are highlighting the problems with industrialized food. But a lot of them are making a big mistake. By focusing on transportation, they overlook other energy-hogging factors in food production.

Take lamb. A 2006 academic study (funded by the New Zealand government) discovered that it made more environmental sense for a Londoner to buy lamb shipped from New Zealand than to buy lamb raised in the U.K. This finding is counterintuitive--if you're only counting food miles. But New Zealand lamb is raised on pastures with a small carbon footprint, whereas most English lamb is produced under intensive factory-like conditions with a big carbon footprint. This disparity overwhelms domestic lamb's advantage in transportation energy.

New Zealand lamb is not exceptional. Take a close look at water usage, fertilizer types, processing methods and packaging techniques and you discover that factors other than shipping far outweigh the energy it takes to transport food. One analysis, by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, showed that transportation accounts for only 11% of food's carbon footprint. A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumer's kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers.

Locavores argue that buying local food supports an area's farmers and, in turn, strengthens the community. Fair enough. Left unacknowledged, however, is the fact that it also hurts farmers in other parts of the world. The U.K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it's true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes--the form of transportation that consumes the most energy--it's also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1.5 million sub-Saharan farmers.

Another chink in the locavores' armor involves the way food miles are calculated. To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale. To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon.

The one big problem with thinking beyond food miles is that it's hard to get the information you need. Ethically concerned consumers know very little about processing practices, water availability, packaging waste and fertilizer application. This is an opportunity for watchdog groups. They should make life-cycle carbon counts available to shoppers.

Until our food system becomes more transparent, there is one thing you can do to shrink the carbon footprint of your dinner: Take the meat off your plate. No matter how you slice it, it takes more energy to bring meat, as opposed to plants, to the table. It takes 6 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken and 10 to 16 pounds to make a pound of beef. That difference translates into big differences in inputs. It requires 2,400 liters of water to make a burger and only 13 liters to grow a tomato. A majority of the water in the American West goes toward the production of pigs, chickens and cattle.

The average American eats 273 pounds of meat a year. Give up red meat once a week and you'll save as much energy as if the only food miles in your diet were the distance to the nearest truck farmer.

If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer's market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.

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I don't know whether anyone's noticed how difficult it is to find quality food at affordable prices. In poorer areas fresh food simply isn't accessible to the local population, although the poor can live in wealthier areas and suffer from high prices just as easily. I know I do.

I rent a room in a house and live on a fixed income in a yuppy bedroom community just outside the state capitol. I can tell you that fresh local [usually organic] food is completely out of my reach financially. I eat twice a day because I can't afford to eat more often than that. I do my best to eat real food, but at the end of the month I'm down to some pretty hard choices, often involving pasta, anchovies, olive oil and garlic. No vegetables, no fruit. (I would kill for a pink grapefruit at the moment, but they're over a dollar apiece. Or fish. What I'd do for fish!) You don't think my weight suffers? I know it does. If I could afford to eat better I would, but I can't. So there you go.

Frankly, I've become tired of trying to find new ways to avoid eating food out of a box or a plastic bag. Still, I'd like to see healthy affordable food as the *primary choice* for all Americans, not simply the select few. If that food's local, great. But don't count on local food sparing the environment. The "local" farmers around here drive their pick-ups to market twice a week, from as many as fifty miles away--which naturally increases their carbon imprint as well as the cost of the produce they sell. Moreover, the notion that local food would be less expensive doesn't hold water. I can go shopping and buy really nice blueberries from Canada for much less than I can purchase them from farmers here in California. The same goes for avocados from South America rather than from San Diego. The list goes on.

I wish some of these people writing these local food studies would go grocery shopping in real stores and farmer's markets in real communities around the country and get an actual clue. I also wish people would quit making simplistic assumptions about why their neighbors are fat. But that's a whole 'nother comment.

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Perhaps we should consider making some of the most offensive "foods" controlled substances, that require a doctor's permission to buy & eat. That would have the effect of driving up the price of the worst offenders enough to reduce the diabetes 2 considerably.
While I agree that the cost of transport is often mistakenly calculated in the comparison between food shipped across the continent & that brought in from a 100 mile radius, reducing the continental dependance on the Central Valley might in the long run be a good thing, water-wise. There is, too, the ecological advantage of small diversified farms over grand-scale monocultures. In cities, anyone with access to a bit of earth can encourage the growth of dandelions & nettles, two very nutritious greens that would improve almost anyone's diet.

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