Waking up listening to Weekend Edition Sunday is one of the best parts of the weekend. There are the features like the weekly puzzle with Will Short and there are some of the best stories on radio. This Sunday was no exception. A story talked about the possibility of finding locally grown foods and one couple's year-long experiment of eating a local diet. It started, as so many things do, as a necessity to put together a good meal from the locally available resources and turned into an exploration of the follies of the global food supply chain.

Recent stories about the pet food recall have pointed out some of the problems with getting food from the lowest bidder. Free marketeers will boldly proclaim that if we just leave the market alone it will correct the problem. Ultimately they are correct. The question is are we willing to pay the price? When the market is left to correct this situation on its own it will be a brutal correction. There won't be a simple soft landing and awareness of the need to change. Rather there will be a catastrophic failure of the supply chain and there will be thousands of people starving when the market makes the folly known.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the groups who should have so much in common in this area are more often at odds than in harmony. The vegans, the ranchers, the environmentalists and the homeland security lobbies should all be united in fighting this fight. Instead each spends time putting down the other group instead of looking deeper and seeing that there is more in common than there is that divides us. Unfortunately until the last acre is paved and the last pineapple delivered from a jumbo-jet we won't get together and then it may be too late.