Vegetable-Industrial Complex
There was an interesting article recently in the New York Times about the "Vegetable-Industrial Complex". It's all about the response to the recent E. Coli contamination of spinach. I'd highly recommend reading it. The author, Michael Pollan (author of An Omnivore's Dilemma), talks about how proposed solutions would only move this country in the wrong direction, an opinion I completely agree with. There's a lot of bad trends that have come out of the cost-cutting, centralizing nature of capitalism and rather than curbing that behavior, our economy and government only creates regulations that reinforce it. It's the reason you get the ridiculous situations described in the article, and the reason why I can never get ripe tomatoes from the supermarket in Berkeley despite the tomatoes being grown in California. The 'progress' of big business doesn't make sense.