Michael Pollan writes, "If you're concerned about chemicals in your produce, you can simply ask the farmer at the market how he or she deals with pests and fertility and begin the sort of conversation between producers and consumers that, in the end, is the best guarantee of quality in your food. So many of the problems in the industrial food chain stem from its length and complexity...In a long food chain, the story and identity of the food (Who grew it? Where and how was it grown?) disappear into the undifferentiated stream of commodities, so that the only information communicated between consumers and producers is price."

Many of you reading this already think about food this way- you shop at small grocers, farmers markets and some of you even grow your own. Don't disregard these ideas when choosing a wine for your supper table. Wine is made from grapes. Grapes that are the fruit of a plant. Great farmers worry more about the plant and the soil than the fruit. If you have great soil and the plant is healthy and drinking the energy of the sun (photosynthesis) the fruit will be good. 

 Michael Pollan continues, "'Eating is an agricultural act,'" Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food, but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values-values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes money and effort, but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote- a vote for health in the largest sense- food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize."