I won't ask you 'do you care what you eat?' because I suspect you'll answer 'of course I do.' Instead I'll pose this question: 'what do you expect from the food that you buy?' I suspect that your answer to this may be like my own - I expect freshness, cleanliness and genuineness in the food that I buy to ingest.
I'm no fanatic; I don't like the idea of fast food but I'll eat the occasional burger and chips; I don't like pigs being reared in batteries, but I'll eat a slice of bacon for breakfast; I like organic food, but I'll eat non-organic. I make accommodations between what I believe and what's practical. I'm happy to eat foods in their season; I could live happily enough without eating strawberries in the Autumn or figs in mid-winter. I'm happy to prepare foods myself, and in this I may be in a minority.

Supermarkets have long discovered that selling basic foodstuffs isn't profitable. Why sell chicken breasts when you can add value (that means selling at a higher price) if you splash a few herbs on first and call it 'herbed chicken breasts'? Why sell just plain cheddar cheese when you can sell it pre-grated for much more? Why sell just a bread stick when you can get much more for it by adding a few cuts, some garlic butter and call it 'garlic bread sticks'? Value adding appeals to the supermarkets because the margins are higher, and it appeals to the consumer because these products are perceived as labour saving.

Look around the fresh fruit and vegetable counter of your local supermarket and do a little investigation. Check out the provenance of the fruit for example. Oranges from South Africa and Israel, mangoes from South America, grapes from Italy, Kiwi fruit from Spain, the list is global. You wouldn't expect to find Irish versions of those fruits, but why do seemingly all our apples come from France? They do grow here, as do pears.

What this is a symptom of is the growing expansion of global trade, enabled by annual GATT talks and an efficient distribution and transportation market. When you start to add up the number of miles it takes to get the food onto your plate, you can get quite a surprise. Firstly let's add your round trip to the supermarket and take a national average of 10 miles - 5 there, 5 back. If you bought Irish potatoes - never mind the ones from Cyprus - they will have travelled from the farmer to the wholesaler, maybe on to a bagging and washing plant, then to the supermarket's own distribution centre and finally to your local supermarket. Do this calculation for every item in your trolley and you'll end up with thousands of miles.

Should you care? I think perhaps you should. All that travel doesn't come free and it gets added to your bill. But that's not the bit that worries me, what I worry about is how long does all of this take? There's no surprise in learning that fresh fruit and vegetables are much higher in vitamin content than those that have been on a shelf or travelling for a week. If you think that a week-old lettuce will do much to improve your children's diet - even if you can get them to eat it - it won't. But that's where things get a bit complicated - you can't always tell by looking at it how old a lettuce may be.

That's thanks to new system of packaging call MAP, which is an acronym for Modified Atmosphere Packaging. Let me take you back 1992 when nearly all the outbreaks of e-coli poisoning were traced to what? Dirty beef? No, it was the deadly lettuce. E-coli, a bacterium associated with the gut and therefore faeces, was finding its way onto lettuces through fertilisers. Obviously not the chemical kind - just the natural kind. This posed a serious threat of litigation to food distributors, since they could be sued by anyone contracting an e-coli infection from the food that they sold. Which brings us to MAP. First the lettuce is separated into its constituent leaves, then they're washed in chlorine at twenty times the concentration you find in a swimming pool, then the leaves are dried, sorted and packed in a plastic bag that contains its own atmosphere, MAP, which can keep the lettuce <it>looking</it> fresh for up to two weeks.

Now this process may well protect retailers against litigation, but does it do anything for you and me? The Rome Institute of Food and Nutrition conducted some tests on MAP and reached the conclusion that many anti-oxidant nutrients - those that protect against ageing, degenerative diseases and cancer such as vitamins C, E, and the polyphenols are destroyed in the MAP process. Worse, the samples they used hadn't been washed in chlorine, which not only disinfects the bugs, but also removes the taste as well, so the full wash plus the MAP process leaves us with precious little goodness and precious little flavour.

All this because it's assumed that the consumer is too lazy to wash salad leaves at home. Yet if you've ever tasted a lettuce from the garden you'll know it's a different beast from the one you'll find in a bag on a supermarket shelf. What it comes down to is this, if you're prepared to wash a lettuce, then you can buy the real thing - maybe only a day or two old - from your local market and get flavour and nutrition in one fell swoop.

Food miles have a big effect on our meat as well. In the past decade most of our local abattoirs have been forced to close by ever more Draconian legislation emanating from Brussels. None of this was with bad intent, the stringent regulations were put in place in order to protect our health. It was for our own good. But sadly, as with most government legislation, the actual effect of it has been to give us beef with more, not less, e-coli infection. Cattle now have to travel further to larger abattoirs, where the sheer numbers increase the risk of cross-infection. All our beef scares, including BSE, have come since the advent of the regulations that were supposed to make our beef safer.

That other staple of life, eggs, also comes under increasing legislation. You can't legally buy an egg that isn't sterile and stamped. Again this is for your own good - it's to protect you from salmonella. But has it? The government pays for advertisements on TV to tell you to cook your eggs thoroughly, to ensure any salmonella bugs will be killed by heat. The legislation hasn't stopped the risk of salmonella, it has merely ensured that a really fresh egg is illegal to obtain.

All of these elements come under the umbrella of 'food safety'. But the question that I would ask is this: what is worse for your health? A bug or a grub in your salad leaves against which you certainly have antibodies, or traces of chlorinated compounds for which you have no antibodies and whose long-term effects we still know nothing of? Me, I'd take my chances with the bugs.

The problem is that the food industry has managed to confuse two things in the consumers' minds. The have successfully equated sterility with 'food safety' and we've bought into that notion. A disinfectant might well make things sterile, but do you want to eat disinfectant? That's what you're being offered with a chlorine wash. There are no bugs, but you get to eat the chlorine residues. Hyper-sterile surroundings merely ensure that our immune systems don't work properly. Essentially you need a little dirt in your diet to keep healthy.

Is there a solution to this? I think that there may well be. The simplest solution is the one in use all over the Continent - the local market. It's the easiest way to bring the end-user consumer in contact with the small producer. This recent phenomenon in Ireland is known as the Farmers' Market. What this system offers the consumer is food that has travelled very few miles and is consequently still high in nutrients and vitamins. It's also a way for small organic growers to get their produce on sale. Most importantly, the local market is a way of reclaiming your food sources - taking them away from large conglomerates and putting them back where they belong - in your hands.

If you're prepared to take the sourcing of your food into your own hands, rather than handing it over to third parties, then you control what you eat. Back to what I asked you at the start of this article. If you care about what you eat, you'll have to care about sourcing it as well. I'm not beating the drum here for just organic produce - any produce that comes from nearby and is fresh is better than something that's travelled three thousand miles and ripened in a nitrogen enhanced atmosphere. I'd go so far as to say that an apple picked from an Irish tree - even if it isn't certified as organic - is still better for you than one that comes from France or even further afield that has 'organic' written all over it.