Listen to the podcast.

Food Fright

The United States has one of the most abundant, and safest, food supplies on the planet. Even so, 80 million people here become ill from contaminated food each year, and 300,000 of them end up in the hospital. Five thousand of them die.

Ironically, what makes our food supply so efficient is also what makes it most vulnerable to health and safety problems. Small amounts of contaminated food from a single source are easily mixed with large amounts of uncontaminated food, then shipped thousands of miles to numerous locations across the country, exposing millions of people to harm.

Even if the food starts out safe, making such a long journey from field to fork affords numerous opportunities for things to go awry, such as broken refrigerated trucks that allow bacteria to grow.

Food safety advocates say one solution is to eat local. Buying meat and produce from local farmers reduces the opportunity for local and widespread contamination to occur. And there are added benefits: It supports your local economy and it reduces the amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced because less gasoline is used to deliver the food.

Many supermarkets are starting to feature locally grown produce. Local produce is also more likely to be organic, another benefit. In fact, organic food sales are growing at four times the rate of non-organic food sales.

So if you need another reason to buy organic, locally grown foods, you can tell yourself that doing is also helping to keep our nation’s food supply safe.

For more information on this story, click here.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org