After almost 200 people were infected with E. coli due to bad spinach these past weeks, it didn’t take long for cries of regulation and inspection to fill the air. Supermarkets experienced recalls, restaurants stopped serving it, but one niche group of providers never stopped production.
Michael Ableman, a farmer in British Columbia, writes about how he had no such absence of spinach during the weeks of the bacteria scare. That’s because he has one integral advantage which the large, mass-producing industrial food systems lack: relationships. When people buy produce from supermarkets, bring them home and consume with little or no preparation, they lose an important health-conscious factor.
Because in terms of being health-conscious, industrial food systems which are responsible for large amounts of cheap food care largely about the overall profit margins — maybe not always health. Mr. Ableman knows that this is why customers regularly consume his produce over theirs: they know him. They know his food and his reputation, and trust it. Could this be the missing link in our own nutrition?
Author by Adams Briscoe
