What’s happening to our food? How did it happen that cows are routinely fed chicken litter, hormones and antibiotics, and parts of other cows? Why does our food travel an average 1,500 miles and many days from the farm to the dinner table while local farmers are going out of business? Why are pigs and chickens raised in cages so small that they can barely turn around and have to have their tails cut off or their beaks clipped in order to keep down the stressed induced mutilations? Why do we have outbreaks of hepatitis from imported green onions?

And why is there massive destruction and loss of soils, heavy chemical and fuel inputs, and an agriculture system based on industrial models? Why is there an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, particularly among people who can least afford food? Why are foods genetically engineered but not labeled as such, labels being something that over 90% of Americans want on their prepared foods? And why are we losing our farmers, losing them so rapidly that there are now more people in the United States in prison than there are farming the land? The answer is that we have lost control of our food system.

For the last 10,000 years or so, all of agriculture was local. Most of our grandparents grew up eating food that they grew themselves, or they knew the farmer that grew the food. Only in the last couple of generations has there been such a radical disconnect from the food that we eat and the farmers that produce it. This has led to a massive concentration in food production, with food becoming just another global commodity, and the near total loss of control on the part of the consumer. Most food production is now out of sight and thus out of mind. That’s why good people of good conscience end up supporting a system that is bad for farmers, bad for farm animals, bad for the land, and bad for the consumers.

And our tax dollars support this massive concentration of farms and the system that makes the foods that are the least healthy for us the cheapest. It is a bitter irony that most of the subsidies to agriculture, subsidies that come from our tax dollars, go to farmers growing corn for corn sugar and grains for meat. This means that almost all prepared foods--from soda to pasta sauce--now contain corn sweetener. It also means that grain-fed meat--meat very high in fat--is extremely cheap. Americans are consuming massive amounts of these prepared foods and cheap fatty meats and getting more overweight and unhealthy. At the same time we are experiencing an epidemic of obesity, an epidemic that is already consuming everyone’s dollars through increased health costs, and now tax dollars are being used directly to address this epidemic.

We can take back our food system. The one sure way to make certain you are not supporting the current destructive industrial agriculture system is to buy locally grown food. Getting to know the person who grows your food is a powerful way to reconnect with food and community--when you support your local farm, you get the freshest food, keep money in the local economy, and make sure that we keep farms as part of our landscape, while making sure that you have a say in how the food is grown.

In the southern Appalachians, we still have many family farms that are eager to grow food for local communities. We are at a critical time for farmers and farmland, with the average age of farmers approaching retirement and too few new farmers to take their place. Only by supporting local agriculture can we create the markets that will attract the new farmers. And only by attracting new farmers and keeping our farms in production will we save the rural landscape of farms and forest that we love.

Fortunately for farmers and communities, there is growing support for local food. Farmers know that their best markets are local and they want their food to stay in the community. Consumers are learning about the high cost of our current food system and that locally grown food is fresher and supports the local economy.

At this time of year, one great way to get the freshest food and reconnect with local farms is to join a CSA. A CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is a direct connection between the farmer and the community. The CSA member pays at the start of the year for a share of the season’s harvest, and then gets a weekly delivery of the freshest food available. The farmer gets money up front and the support of the community.

Find a local CSA and other sources of locally grown food in the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project’s Local Food Guide, available in print and on the web at www.BuyAppalachian.org. Charlie Jackson is the Local Food Campaign Director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. For more info on ASAP, contact him at 828-293-3262, Charlie@BuyAppalachian.org.

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