THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

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As for what that means in the field, consider the potato. In his brilliantly devastating book Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin), Eric Schlosser explains that a few companies control most of the potato market. Fast food purveyors now buy frozen fries for about 30 cents a pound, reheat them in oil and sell them (with added grease) for about $6 a pound. On every $1.50 order of fries a potato farmer makes 2 cents.

The result was reported in The New York Times last summer. Under the headline "Misery is Abundant for Potato Farmers," the story pointed out that it costs a potato farmer about $5 to produce a 100 pound sack of potatoes, for which the processors pay him less than $1. What's a farmer to do? The subhead said it: "Bumper Crops Turned into Fertilizer." Many farmers plowed their crops under. When that happened in the Great Depression, it was all over the papers. Now it hardly makes the news.

In the Northeast, where I live, the loss of farmers is catastrophic: Cranberry growers have been told to cut production because a surplus has driven prices too low.

New York State dairyman and orchardists are going out of business every day. Two years ago, I visited an upstate dairy where the farmer had earned more for growing one acre of gourmet potatoes than from a year of dairying. The next year, lots of upstate dairymen grew gourmet potatoes, prices dropped and that little stream of hope dried up.

And it wasn't apples my landscape-architect friend went to buy at the orchard we visited one day. He was buying mature apple trees for an instant antique orchard, part of the multimillion-dollar landscaping of a new McMansion. The trees the farmer sold that afternoon netted him more than a month of apple selling.

It isn't just New York growers who are in trouble either. Apple producers everywhere now compete directly with China's cheap labor. The world's most populous nation, with little land per capita for food production, has set out to become apple producer for the world, although growing apples for export utilizes precious land on which China should grow food for her people.

Faced with such an ominously changing food landscape, what can we do?

Almost 30 years ago, I went into the field I nutrition because I was concerned about what was happening to the U.S. food supply as the world faced a food and population crisis. The products appearing on our grocery shelves seemed increasingly frivolous in a world full of hungry people. Could we feed everyone, I wondered, without devastating the environment? Wasn't the array of filly cereals and juice drinks a shameful distraction from the real issues? My search for answers to those questions led me to the - conclusion that our food supply was wasteful and unsustainable, and the methods we were exporting to increase food production around the world were likely to end up making things worse.

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