Let me step in here to say that if, for whatever reason, you prefer to eat expensive food that is grown with inefficient, primitive methods you’re welcome to do so. If you wish to encourage others to do so, that’s fine too.

But I think there’s an overly romantic (yes, I’m calling Cynical Sue a romanticist) view of the past, sometimes. When we were living in caves, all our food was organic and grown locally. Not that we had much food, or lived very long. The neat thing about industrialization is that it enables us to afford the luxury of being picky about where our food comes from.

As an aside: From watching Little House on the Prairie, I learned several things about the old days. For one, every year Pa would bust his back all summer raising a crop, only to have it wiped out by a hail storm just before harvest. He’d then go out and get a job hauling nitroglycerine for the railroad and make enough money in a single week to get them through the winter. I also learned that a hurricane lantern is not used for illumination; it is an incendiary device that only appears when a barn is about to burn down.