You are what you eat

I've talked a lot about the food we eat. I've been keenly aware of it actually. As we embark on a time of cost-cutting at our house, we need to think harder about food. The thing is, a lot of our food comes from all over the world. The average American meal travels 1,500 miles. That's farther than it is from Buffalo to New Orleans (1,100 miles as the crow flies). That's across the country.

So clearly, we're getting food from elsewhere. And that's fine. Except they don't have the same standards as we do. And we're not really checking that hard into the standards. Consider this from the Toronto Star.

ZHANGQIU, China–As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the U.S. and Canada, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

Indeed. If we are what we eat, then we're also a little bit about where the food we eat comes from. So keep your eyes open. And eat well.