Welcome to Suburban Farming

Our culture in America has allowed corporations to take over the supply of food that we eat.  The average vegetable at a Denny's restaurant travels over 1500 before we eat it.  This is ridiculous.  Plus, the food isn't fresh, and it's generally conventionally grown ... so by the time it gets to us it has lost most of the menial nutritional value that it started with.  Plus this makes us beholden to big corporations, who choose which foods to offer us.  So we end up eating the foods that are most profitable for them to sell.  We used to choose from hundreds of different varieties of apples just 100 years ago, now the apple consumer is really only offered ten or twelve varieties.
The good news is, that there is a simple solution, grow it yourself.  Grow extra and trade with your neighbors.  If you live in a community where others are doing the same thing, then whole communities can, in large part, support themselves by simply getting connected with their neighbors.  This is why suburban farming and sustainable community are such radically effective concepts.  And we are really just relearning what our grandparents already knew, that we should cultivate much of what we need from the land.