The New Food Inspector: You

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from a January Washington Post article.

Ina Fernandez admits it. She's a little obsessive-compulsive about grocery shopping. How else to explain that in a single week the 40-year-old Woodbridge resident visits as many as seven grocery stores — Trader Joe's, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Costco, Safeway, Giant and a local Latin market — to find what she wants? In season, Fernandez also shops at the farmers market.

A longtime vegetarian, Fernandez wants certified organic fruits and vegetables, free-range or cage-free eggs and packaged foods without preservatives or additives. "There are so many issues now — hormones, cloned meat — that I spend a lot of time reading labels, trying to figure out what's in it. Labels can give a false sense of security, so I try to figure out for myself the best I can what I'm eating, and then I just hope for the best."

It's no wonder Americans want to know more about the provenance of their food. In the past year, food scares, scandals and labeling battles regularly have made headlines. Topps Meat recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef after the meat tested positive for a deadly strain of E. coli bacteria. Dozens of shipments of Chinese seafood were halted by the Food and Drug Administration due to contamination. In a much-publicized case, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture tried to ban producers from advertising that their milk was hormone-free. This month the FDA ruled that cloned meat is safe to eat and could be sold without special labeling, though it may be years before it ends up on store shelves.

Such news always has worried a certain segment of society. But the drumbeat of bad news has spread unease from the farmers market crowd to mainstream shoppers. In 2007, the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group of food retailers and wholesalers, reported that the number of shoppers confident that food at the grocery store was safe had dropped to 66 percent from 82 percent the previous year. (Just 43 percent were confident about getting safe food at restaurants.) In a GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media survey taken in November, 50 percent of respondents said they were confident that there were adequate food safety regulations in place. "Locavore," a term for a person who seeks out locally produced food, was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2007 word of the year.

Like Fernandez, a growing number of shoppers apparently are trying to become their own food inspectors, using the Internet and their values about health, the environment and local communities to guide them. "There's a crisis of confidence about food. And that's why people are looking to alternatives to the industrial food system," says Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" may be contributing to the growing anxiety. "The safety of food is a fundamental biological goal, and for 50 years we have outsourced it to the USDA and to companies who tell us about 'whole-grain goodness.' It's seductive to outsource this part of our lives, but it's been a disaster for our health, our welfare and our pleasure."