How to Secure Your Food Supply

I'm in the Atlanta area for the annual family reunion, and food security was a the subject of this editorial in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

The threat of terrorist assault on our food is neither rhetorical nor far-fetched. Before leaving his post as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson warned ominously: "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."

Thompson, who supported the tougher regulations, said those concerns often kept him awake at night. Unless the FDA adopts more aggressive safeguards against food-based terrorism, none of us can rest easy.

True enough. But systems on this scale, whether it's food or electricity or tranportation or communications, will never be invulnerable to attack. They are simply too big, with too many points of accessibility.

The solution? There are 2 things people can do immediately to vastly decrease their exposure to terrorist attacks on food systems:

1. Scale back. Buy your food from near where you live, from farmers and merchants that you know or know of. There are countless small-market producers of everything from juice to cereal to spaghetti to beer. With a a little bit of focus and investment (think about the impact of all those cotton subsidies going to local, community oriented farmers!), communities and agricultural regions could provide all the necessities in a very short amount of time.

2. Do without. Do you really need to eat strawberries from Argentina, or even the Central Valley of California (unless you live in Fresno), in January? Probably not. Given how little we've had to sacrifice for the war on jihadism thus far (a few wandings at the airport and stress over deficit spending are about it, day to day), going without a few types of fruits and vegetables when they are out of season is not much to ask.

I was not around for World War II. But I associate it with the Victory Garden - backyard gardens that families cultivated so that 1) large scale food growers could focus on feeding the troops, and 2) they could purchase government bonds that funded the war. What an incredible, simple, and effective idea.