Essay --

The smell of thanksgiving dinner piques your interest long before you see it. Visions of roasted meats, potatoes dripping with gravy, butter soaked rolls and steaming pumpkin pies dance through your mind. However, when you run downstairs and observe the feast, you can hardly believe your eyes, plates overflow with foods you’ve never seen before: Yellowstone carrots, Royal Burgundy beans, Golden beets, and a Bourbon Red turkey. The color wheel cooked and set on your table sparking images of a completely different time, when the producer of our food was the farmer down the road; when our freshly prepared meals were packed with nutrients and the words affordable and healthy went hand-in-hand. In today’s American life, this vision of our food system is nowhere near our dinner plates. We were once confined to eating what was within sight and within season, but no longer do climates or distances constrain our menus. Our pantries are full year round -- all foods and all seasons. Plus, its cheap; so cheap that of each dollar we spend only nine cents will be on the life sustaining nutrients our bodies demand according to Annette Clauson in 2010 on behalf of the United State Department of Agriculture. However, two side effects of this system are becoming ever more obvious. First, we face a major food-related health care crisis and second, our farmers continue to experience economic insecurity. Fortunately, a forward-thinking group of people works to solve these problems by turning back the clock and taking a lesson from better times. They ask, â€Å"What if instead of being shipped from unknown locations, our food came from closer to home, from our friends and neighbors whose practices we know and whose livelihood we can support?† They seek t... ...he country which is documented by Martinez for the Department of Agriculture where he also discusses how community supported agriculture programs sustain nearly 1,500 farms. Chico has our very own farmers markets and they vary throughout the year of what day. They sell flowers, food, fresh crops, plus other locally produced items. The potential for these numbers to grow is enormous; especially if people want this food. With such powerful information streaming on a daily basis, think of what the future could hold: a food system where the agrarian heritage of our nation refocuses on a nutritionally sustainable, economically healthy future. Where consumers know the producers of their quality food and where agriculture is a financially robust enterprise. Making this vision a reality doesn’t require anything radical; we must simply try to buy local as often as we can.