• Partner with your grower—let them know that you would eat it if they would grow it. A guaranteed market may be all they need to make the leap to extending their season or even building a root cellar so they can supply their community into the winter. The partnership provides an additional revenue stream for growers and great, local flavor for eaters.


• Buy local dairy. Pasture-based dairies may have fresh milk on hand, depending on how they winter over their animals. They may also have cheese made from last season’s milk. Give them a call and see if they might be able to stock you up with some creamy delights.


• Depending on where you live, you might have access to a year-round market. We do in New York and I’ll be paying them some visits when my farmer’s supply runs out. Check with your state’s department of agriculture to see if you have a four-season market in your area.


• Contact growers from your local market. They may have cold storage items such as potatoes, apples, and garlic that they would be happy to pass along. Growers who raise pasture-based meats often have a frozen supply available.


• Check with your grocery store manager. They may be carrying some cold-storage crops—like apples and pears—from local growers. Opt for those over imports.

I am not saying that we should do away with good practices in the kitchen. Nor am I suggesting that a sterile food system is the goal here or even a possibility—unless we want to dine on pristine vitamin pellets some level of bacteria load is and always will be a part of eating from the earth. But the kind and quantity of food borne illness we are seeing is NOT a natural bi-product of agriculture. It is not some sort of margin for error that should be factored into the food production equation. In just the last few months we have seen the recall of tainted spinach, carrot juice, ground beef, and lettuce and an unidentified source of contamination that sickened and killed customers at Taco Bell. This extent of contamination is the consequence of having an over-concentrated, heavily consolidated food production system and a government that is more than happy to turn a blind eye to it all.

The changes necessary to clean up our food supply are not rocket science. Would they require sweeping changes in the way our food is produced? Yes. Would they impact the bottom line of corporate agribusiness? You bet. But they would also save lives and make our food supply more delicious in the process. That's change I'll vote for. But you don't have to wait. You can use most of these tips yourself to limit your exposure to toxic pathogens:

1. No more corn-fed beef. Corn acidifies the animal’s stomach making it a veritable petri-dish for the particularly virulent strain of E. coli—E. coli 0157:H7—that can be deadly when ingested by humans. Switching animals to their natural grass-based diet drastically reduces, and often eliminates, these acid tolerant organisms from their system.


2. Slow down. Over the past twenty years the speed of meat processing has sky rocketed. Plants that used to slaughter 175 cattle an hour now process about 400 per hour. This fast pace overstresses workers who cannot take the care necessary to prevent contamination.


3. Dry chickens. Look for poultry that is “air chilled.” These birds have not been run through the industry standard dunk tank, notorious for its bacterial load, to chill them quickly during processing.


4. No cannibalism. Animals contract Mad Cow disease when they eat tissue from animals infected with the disease. Stop the practice of feeding vegetarian ruminants such as cows processed animal products—things like blood meal and chicken litter which contains restaurant scraps—and the vector for Mad Cow transmission will be eliminated.


5. Leave it on. Pre-cut lettuces, whittled carrots, and shredded slaw may shave a few minutes off of prep time but removing the food’s natural barriers—the outer leaves, peels and skins—makes it more vulnerable to contamination. Leave Mother Nature’s “shrink wrap” in tact until you’re ready to make your dish.


6. Keep produce whole until it reaches the kitchen. Each of the many steps involved in processing pre-cut produce creates another opportunity for the food to become compromised by food borne pathogens. Reduce your exposure to bacteria by selecting only whole fruits and vegetables.


7. Think outside the bag. Those bags of processed produce may look fresh but those veggies have been cooped up in what is essentially a hot house for days, maybe even weeks. Pass on that petri dish.


8. Shorten the distance between you and the grower. The long line of the conveyor belt—which starts in the field and snakes to the cooling truck, through the washers and dryers, around the processing facilities, into cooling chambers and packing houses, onto shipping trucks, into the back of the central distribution center, onto the regional delivery truck, onto the loading dock (for how long during the stock boys lunch break?) and to a display shelf near you—well you get the point, how can anything remain “fresh” after a journey like that?


9. Support local, family farms. A decentralized food system limits the impact of any incidence of contamination—accidental or intentional.


10. I’ll say it again. Support local, family farms. If they’re feeding it to their family, you can feed it to yours, too.