My local grocer and I chat a lot. Mainly because he is a block away and my 2.5 year old lives for the trips to "see people" at the grocery, and I think we were in Cub Scouts together. He tells me he buys locally, because it is fresher, better and cheaper produce, when IN SEASON.

However, when the customers want watermelon in January and summer squash in February, he has to purchase from Mexico or California. ( By the way, what is the growing season for locally-produced produce in Vermont anyway?)

Who is at fault here? In my mind, the consumer. Corporate farms would die a quick death when no one wants to buy produce out of local season. If people demanded free range local meat, they would have it. Business is good at delivering what we want.

To make a swine analogy, if people really demanded only non-factory pork, how long would the factory farms last?

My grocer could force me to make better food choices, but is that his mission? Should he risk customers going elsewhere because he is making their moral choices for them? Maybe. But that behaviour lies far outside of what businesses see as their mission -- to meet the needs of the consumer.

To quote again Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us" . I guess I think that blaming "industry" and "factory" and the financial community is avoiding the painful truth that will set us free. We need to change.

there is no crisis in the bee world, and while insecticides do play a role in the losses they are not the sole or leading cause. the sole cause for losses is beekeeper applied chemicals to treat for mites. other important factors are a loss of habitat and then corresponding decrease in nutritional diversity. 

if european honeybees dwindle the more aggressive and robust africanized honeybee will take over which it is doing already in the deep south and southern CA

In the 1970s we were fighting for our lives with Russia.

And they were winning.

Our energy intensive agricultural system was a way to grow our population rapidly to keep up with what seemed like a Soviet system that could produce more soldiers, more warheads and maybe more goods than us.

So we punted and signed the SALT treaty while we massed our forces.

We fed the kids high energy high sugar stuff to make us bigger, stronger and able to pound Ivan under the table.

The fallout was lots of fat people and diabetes.

Even today, only something like 3 percent of the population is fit enough to join the Army.   But those that do are virtual terminators.

Do we still need to do this to ourselves?

Do we have to grow super soldiers to beat Al Qaeda?

Maybe not so much any more.

Those of us with high speed Internet and abundant free time to make our Internet proclamations of outlawing factory farms need to provide the comparable-cost alternatives to the factory farms, or at least give the less fortunate majority the right to buy the meat they can afford.

Though I guess a massive educational campaign showing these people how they can affordably feed their family year-round on locally produced vegetables would be a green alternative. Yet, even living in a fertile area at 30.4N degrees latitude and myself being a moderately successful gardener, this is appears to be problematic. I can only imagine the challenges of this in Detroit or Chicago or even Vermont. 

Maybe this is a great volunteer education opportunity for those more knowledgeable than myself in these matters.

Extrapolating from your comments I would think that we have no free choice,  between  the corporations manipulating our desires and our ELECTED government manufacturing our consent and all --are we really that helpless? Have we been brainwashed and water-boarded into eating at McDonald's and buying packaged Pringles? I think maybe not. Possibly, just possibly, we choose to do that. How many people do you know that actually want to can produce? How many do you know that even know how?

My point is -- we can make other choices without happily killing ourselves with Big Macs while blaming the corporations and government for allowing us to buy it,  but most choose not to make other choices.Come on, every American knows what advertising truely is, and that our government is corrupt, we just want to wait for someone else to fix it.

Dont make me tell you how much money, water, gasoline, time and fertilizer I spent canning 100 ears of corn three years ago. Suffice to say it was many times what it cost at the grocery. Harvesting and canning for two days in July in 98F heat was not really a fun experience. Though it may be cooler in Vermont.

 I am not disagreeing with you. Though mass-die-offs is not a very popular remedy to our problems, it is a tool of nature to deal with them. That process is one, argurably, that man interferes with most heavily in nature.

My darkest plan D is moving to the homesteads of my family of the 1800s, which thankfully is property still in the hands of my family, and making an existence as they did. Thankfully the memories of the specific housing, farming, canning and water supply folklore still exists. The fact that the vessels of that knowledge lived to be over 100 years old attests the the viability of that past lifestyle.

It is so fascinating to learn of the comfort of a "dog trot" house built to use seasonal tree shade, hills and prevailing winds. To learn that a simple cellar in the earth can keep many root vegetables edible all through the off-season months, and that natural limb fall from trees can provide heating, personal cleaning and cooking energy year round. Brine (salt) can preserve meat etc.

My only concern is that most of the population does not have that advantage and sometimes efficient methods of business help with making this available to the masses. I confess that one of my educational degrees is a business degree which I feel adds a practical tool to many of my ideas. Frankly, I still challenge a single gardener to produce many food stocks (corn) more energy efficently than a factory farm. If you have done this with any foodstock, I would be most appreciative of the details. To save you time, yes, I have used compost, chicken manure and rainwater.

Sadly,  most of the population of the earh does not have that advantage of arible real estate. What say we to them?

What tends to dampen the food bubbles are immense subsidies and crop insurance for Big Ag.  If it was a truly free market with no supports, many of these conglomerates would have to scale back, go bankrupt, or walk away from the fields and food factories.  For example, I have no idea why the US supports sugarcane growers, since we produce it for more than we can import it - well without the heavy import tarriff on sugar, that is.

Such a huge, inefficient system can lead to massive failures, or crops so bountiful that grain rots in the silos, and has to be trucked to the dump.  Big Ag doesn't care - it has commodities margins, subsidies, insurance, and all kinds of fancy derivitive-like tools to stave off large losses. 

For good or indifferent, I do see some people starting to demand local-grown food when in season.  I don't know if that is a passing fad, but even the USDA and state agencies fund some farmer's markets and gets the growers to provide healthy foods - with an accent on promoting organic when possible.  It's a refreshing thing, especially if it lasts and grows bigger.  I would even allow some subsidies for the meat and dairy products sector, within reason.  Now there's a subsidy I can support!

Back 100 years ago where I grew up (hah, I'm not THAT old), people had fresh stuff in the summer and canned, dried, smoked, stocked root sellars, or did whatever to make it last through the winter.  By the end of winter, people were usually down to whatever potatoes, dried beans, turnips, or whatever starch hadn't rotted yet.  They ate a lot of deer, fish, and birds by hunting, and slaughtered some farm animals they would rather sell to the market.  If you didn't do it this way, you got sick and died.  Today, we're so incredibly spoiled ... but are we better off?

That's a good question.  One can't make the argument that we're "better" nutrionally, evidenced by the high rates of obesity, diabetes, occassional E. coli outbreaks, and other diseases associated with a poor diet.  One could almost make a point that is a few giant food companies went bust because of a "food bubble," we'd respond by planting real food all over the place as a matter of necessity.  Gee, I never looked at it that way ...

It just doesn't fit into the lives of people like buying in the grocery store does, especially if you include those that are open 24 hours a day like the Wal Mart supercenters.

I did it at one time, but it just became too difficult. I loved the local food, mostly organic, but between having to fit their schedule and having to come up with the total price for the entire year, then preserving it myself, I just don't have the time or energy any more.

Industrial corn production at 300 bushels per acre (national average is much less, probably under 150 with global warming predicted to decrease) is only 8 tons per acre of  a what is a pretty low value foodstuff in terms of nutrition.

There's also the declining nutritional value of industrial food. The land grants and industry lied for years saying there was no benefit to organic. There's a huge nutritional benefit that is getting bigger over time. Alan Weisman's book, "The World Without Us," has a chapter talking about sealed seeds and foodstufs prodced in the mid-1800s in England. These samples had far more nutrition than current production. "The End of Food" by Thomas Pawlick is a whole book dedicated to that topic, comparing USDA nutrition studies over time. 

Then there's the issue of sustainability. Green Revolution type farming takes water, capital, fertilizer, pesticides that Third World farmers can't afford. Throwing them off the land to become squatters in the city so agribusiness can take over farming is no solution, its genocide.