Felicity Northcott at Johns Hopkins surmises, "People in this country are very alienated from the whole process of eating. What we do is we go into these fast-food places and it's always the same thing, it's always mediocre. It's not about how we make a connection with food. It's about eating for eating's sake rather than any kind of sensual experience."
Still, there are important reasons for considering where food comes from. Northcott argues, "As long as it ends up on their plate and it looks like a burger and french fries, consumers don't want to know anything else, and therefore they take no responsibility for eating what they eat, in terms of political responsibility." But there is a political responsibility —"60 percent of all vegetables eaten in this country are potatoes," offers Northcott, "and the potato is one of the few vegetables that is subsidized by the government, so that when you eat, it's a political decision. There are implications for the people who grow the food, the people who pick the food, the people who process the food and, ultimately, the people who eat the food."
Indeed, we are connected to these food systems in unexpected ways. "It becomes important to your health to know the living and working conditions that the people who pick and pack your produce live under," argues Nicols Fox. She refers to a 1996 outbreak of Cyclospora in the U.S. to illustrate her point: "Are there bathroom facilities in that raspberry patch in Guatemala? Or are people using the irrigation ditches as bathrooms and then using that same water to dilute the pesticides that they spray on your raspberries? That's actually how raspberries in Guatemala became contaminated, and I think people are beginning to understand that it matters."
