Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market (Worldwatch Paper #163)

From the back cover: "Everyone, everywhere depends increasingly on long distance food. Encouraged by food processing innovation, cheap oil, and subsidies, since 1961 the value of global trade in food has tripled and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold, while population has only doubled. In the United States, food typically travels between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers from farm to plate, as much as 25 percent farther than in 1980.