foodperson.com

Interested in knowing more about where your food comes from? Here are a couple of links with definitely different approaches to what you, the food consumer, might want to know.

At ChewsWise.com, journalist Samuel Fromartz focuses his skeptical journalist’s eye on the food industry, particularly organics. Fromartz is the author of Organic, Inc., a book about the organics industry and its move from small farms to mega farms. The ChewsWise blog includes links to other informative websites and blogs, such as Ethicurean.com.

Meanwhile, over at the Food and Drug Administration, the officials there begun, with some small fanfare, a consumer Web page. It’s a nice gesture (although you have to wonder why it took FDA so long to put up a consumer-oriented Web page), but you aren’t likely to read much you didn’t already know. And any consumer who finds his or her way to the FDA site probably won’t find a link to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s MyPyramid.gov website, which actually leads consumers to information about what they should be eating for better health. I’m not saying the FDA site doesn’t have a link; I just didn’t see it. Does make you wonder a little bit about who’s health the FDA is trying to protect, that’s all. To be fair, though, there’s a lot of overlap among the federal agencies, but we won’t be getting into a discussion about wasteful bureaucracy at this juncture.

UPDATE: The USDA link is now http://myplate.gov/, and it may be easier to find.

And speaking of books, novelist Barbara Kingsolver, along with her daughter and husband, have joined the tellers of nonfiction stories of eating locally. Their newly released book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, tells their story of eating from their garden and other local food sources. I haven’t read it, but Kingsolver’s a great writer, and the subject, based on her novels, is surely one she can warm up to.