It comes as no surprise that nationwide, people are worried about getting sick from contaminated food, as reported in a front page story on Monday. Nor is it any wonder that locally, people are looking to buy produce grown right here in North Central Washington, as Wenatchee World reporter Rachel Schleif reported last week.
The latest tainted tomato-turned-jalapeño scare has been confusing and frustrating to me, both as a health care reporter and a consumer. I haven’t had to cover it since an Okanogan teenager got sick in June, but I’ve stayed on top if it, in case new cases here appeared.

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal helps sort out the misconceptions, and helps explain why it’s so difficult to track.

What’s interesting to me is how this all might tie in to recent trends to buy local. We’ve become so global, we like to get exotic foods, and be able to buy all kinds of fruit and produce year ’round.

But I’m seeing the word locavore more often. It’s not in my computer spell check, but it’s in Wikipedia, and it certainly gets plenty of hits in a Google search. The idea behind it has more to do with supporting local products, becoming self-sufficient as a community, using less gasoline to transport goods, creating a smaller carbon footprint. But as time goes on, I suspect food safety will be high on the list of reasons that people decide to support their local farmers.