People often ask how I answer that question for myself. They’re curious to know how my investigations of the food chain have changed the way I and my family eat, whether we still eat meat (yes, but much less often and only from a handful of suppliers I can vouch for); whether I buy organic (usually, though given the opportunity I much prefer to buy local); whether I go out of my way to avoid high-fructose corn syrup (yes, though not so much because it’s an evil molecule as because it’s a reliable marker for the kind of highly processed foods I try to avoid); and whether I ever eat junk food. (Busted. I have a weakness for Cracker Jacks, corn chips and pizza, and therefore I don’t think of those delicacies as junk food.) So after spending the past month trying to answer the dinner question in the largest ethical, environmental and nutritional sense, I thought a good way to wrap up my column here would be to answer it in the narrowest sense: What am I having for dinner night?

The answer to that question is found in a box.

One of the biggest changes I’ve made in my eating was to join a C.S.A. farm. C.S.A. stands for community supported agriculture, an awkward name for an elegant scheme. C.S.A. farms are a little like magazines: you “subscribe” to them, on an annual or monthly basis, and in exchange for a fee ($60 a month in my case), you receive a weekly box of produce, which you can pick up either from the farm or from a drop-off location or, for an additional fee, have delivered to your door.

Dozens of good C.S.A.’s operate in the Bay Area, where I live. I chose to join — and that is the operative word, as I’ll explain — Full Belly Farm’s. (To find a C.S.A. near you, go to localharvest.org or the Department of Agriculture’s C.S.A. Web page; see also the other Web resources listed in my earlier post, “Food From a Farm Near You.”) I was familiar with Full Belly Farm from shopping at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market, where they sell produce every Tuesday. The farm in the Capay Valley, a couple-of-hours drive northeast of Berkeley, grows 80 different fruit and vegetable crops, and they’ve offered C.S.A. boxes since 1992. (America’s first C.S.A. was started in the 1980’s in Western Massachusetts; the concept began in Europe a few years before that.) Full Belly has always been highly diversified, economically as well as biologically. In addition to the C.S.A. and farmer’s markets, they sell food wholesale to small and large grocers in the Bay Area, including Whole Foods. I’d always been impressed by the quality and variety of their vegetables. So when we decided to join a C.S.A., Full Belly seemed a logical choice.

I pick up my box from the front porch of a house a couple of blocks away from mine. I have no idea whose house it is, or why they lend their porch to a C.S.A., but every Tuesday the porch is stacked high with boxes. There’s also a table on the porch, set with a vase of fresh flowers, some brochures and a sign-up sheet. I initial my name on the sheet, return last week’s box to the pile of empties, and pick up a new box, wondering what this week’s harvest will bring — and what we will have for dinner that night.

It is less like shopping for food than going out in the garden to see what’s ripe. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays we never plan dinner in advance, preferring to let the farmer — which is to say, a particular patch of soil and the weather — determine the menu for us. I remember reading in one of Alice Waters’s cookbooks that she would never decide on the night’s menu at her restaurant Chez Panisse till she’d visited the farmer’s market, where the vegetables would speak to her and tell her what to cook.

Sometimes the vegetables speak loud and clear, as when asparagus is in season. Last week, these spears, cut just hours before they were boxed, were so fresh it would have been criminal to do anything more elaborate than to steam them and drizzle a little lemon juice and olive oil on them. But there are times when the vegetables in the box speak inscrutably, or not at all. For a few weeks this winter, the box offered rather more rutabagas than you ever want to see, and I had to consult a few cookbooks before determining how best to deploy them. One week I made a puree with carrots, also from the box; another time I sliced and simply roasted them with olive oil. Interesting. I would never buy rutabagas at the market, but I was happy to be forced into exploring this vegetable’s (mildly) underestimated possibilities.

Actually the folks at Full Belly — who include a helpful and nicely written newsletter, The Full Belly Beet, with each box — sounded a little apologetic about some of those late winter, rutabaga-heavy boxes. But as the newsletter explained, the winter rains were brutal and unremitting this year clear through April, delaying spring planting and devastating some of the crops, including the peaches and strawberries. So we got more root crops than usual and, to make up for it one week, a gorgeous bunch of flowers.

But that’s the point: as “shareholders” in a C.S.A., we share equally in the farm’s bounty and shortfalls, its triumphs and disasters. The word shareholder is not empty in this case; certainly it more closely describes the relationship we’ve entered into than the words “consumer” and “producer” would. As John Peterson, the C.S.A. farmer from Illinois who is profiled in the new documentary “The Real Dirt on Farmer John,” describes it, the “C.S.A. is a new socioeconomic form in which the farm and consumer enter into a sort of partnership, an alliance to take care of each other’s needs.” For the farmer, the C.S.A. relationship means a reliable cash flow through the growing season (with money up front to help pay for planting) and shareholders who share in the risks and rewards of an enterprise that will always be at the mercy of the weather. For the shareholder, it means the freshest possible food received at the end of the shortest possible food chain.

More important, the C.S.A. reconnects you as an eater with the source of your food, offering a vivid reminder that, whatever we eat, we eat by the grace of farms and farmers, of the land, the weather and the season — not supermarkets. The C.S.A. means I also eat in the knowledge that I’m doing my small bit to defend a gorgeous patch of bottomland along Cache Creek outside the tiny town of Guinda from the oncoming wave of sprawl that threatens to engulf California’s entire Central Valley into one big, wall-to-wall housing development.

Eating from the C.S.A. box constitutes the very opposite of industrial eating, that sort of unconscious consumption based on our desire to eat whatever we want whenever we want it — tomatoes in January, strawberries in October — food that’s been cleaned, cut up, processed, cooked, everything but chewed and digested for us. That food chain offers convenience, sure, yet in the end it depends on ignorance — of the cost of eating that way, and of all the labor, energy and technology it requires. To eat from the C.S.A. box, with its newsletter chronicling the week’s doings on the farm, is to eat in a fuller knowledge of all that’s involved in getting food to our plates, including the necessity, and pleasure, of cooking. (Most C.S.A. newsletters offer recipes.) There’s a lot more going on than the exchange of money for food.

So what’s in the box this week? It’s a good one, suggesting we’ve arrived on the cusp of summer. There’s asparagus again, a big bunch of pencil-thin spears; a bag of new potatoes and a bunch of carrots; a big bag of salad mix; a little bag of walnuts; a fat head of garlic; and — I could smell it through the box the moment I lifted it from the porch — the season’s first bunch of basil. Even before I consulted the newsletter, which offered the suggestion and a recipe, I recognized the summery possibility: pesto for dinner tonight.

Thanks to everyone who read these offerings and, especially, to all who offered their two cents in response to my posts. I’ve profited enormously from your comments, criticisms and leads. Still, a great many topics never quite made it to the “Table.” In fact, the list keeps growing: the coming debate over the farm bill (which you can keep tabs on by going to the Web site for the American Farmland Trust); the question of whether organic can feed the world (yes, according to a terrific article by Brian Halwell in the May/June issue of “World Watch,” which effectively rebuts Steven Shapin’s offhand dismissal of the possibility in the May 15 issue of The New Yorker); and the need to address the food system’s role in the energy and climate-change crisis (an important truth overlooked by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” and Whole Foods president John Mackey’s recent open letter to me in response to both my book and this blog). So I may have to come back here and post again from time to time. Watch this space. And remember: Vote with your fork!

I’ve spent the past five years exploring this daunting food landscape, following the industrial food chain from the Happy Meal back to the not-so-happy feedlots in Kansas and cornfields in Iowa where it begins and tracing the organic food chain back to the farms. My aim was simply to figure out what–as a nutritional, ethical, political and environmental matter–I should eat. Along the way, I’ve collected a few rules of thumb that may be useful in navigating what I call the Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket: the epoxy-like tubes of Go-Gurt, the preternaturally fresh Twinkies, the vaguely pharmaceutical Vitamin Water. Those aren’t foods, quite; they’re food products. History suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the classic case in point. My mother used to predict “they” would eventually discover that butter was better for you. She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. Eat food, not food products.

Avoid foods containing high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It’s not just in cereals and soft drinks but also in ketchup and bologna, baked goods, soups and salad dressings. Though HFCS was not part of the human diet until 1975, each of us now consumes more than 40 lbs. a year, some 200 calories a day. Is HFCS any worse for you than sugar? Probably not, but by avoiding it you’ll avoid thousands of empty calories and perhaps even more important, cut out highly processed foods–the ones that contain the most sugar, fat and salt. Besides, what chef uses high-fructose corn syrup? Not one. It’s found only in the pantry of the food scientist, and that’s not who you want cooking your meals.

Spend more, eat less. Americans are as addicted to cheap food as we are to cheap oil. We spend only 9.7% of our income on food, a smaller share than any other nation. Is it a coincidence we spend a larger percentage than any other on health care (16%)? All this “cheap food” is making us fat and sick. It’s also bad for the health of the environment. The higher the quality of the food you eat, the more nutritious it is and the less of it you’ll need to feel satisfied.

Pay no heed to nutritional science or the health claims on packages. It was science that told us margarine made from trans fats is better for us than butter made from cow’s milk. The more I learn about the science of nutrition, the less certain I am that we’ve learned anything important about food that our ancestors didn’t know. Consider that the healthiest foods in the supermarket–the fresh produce–are the ones that don’t make FDA-approved health claims, which typically festoon the packages of the most highly processed foods. When Whole Grain Lucky Charms show up in the cereal aisle, it’s time to stop paying attention to health claims.

Shop at the farmers’ market. You’ll begin to eat foods in season, when they are at the peak of their nutritional value and flavor, and you’ll cook, because you won’t find anything processed or microwavable. You’ll also be supporting farmers in your community, helping defend the countryside from sprawl, saving oil by eating food produced nearby and teaching your children that a carrot is a root, not a machine-lathed orange bullet that comes in a plastic bag. A lot more is going on at the farmers’ market than the exchange of money for food.

How you eat is as important as what you eat. Americans are fixated on nutrients, good and bad, while the French and Italians focus on the whole eating experience. The lesson of the “French paradox” is you can eat all kinds of supposedly toxic substances (triple crème cheese, foie gras) as long as you follow your culture’s (i.e., mother’s) rules: eat moderate portions, don’t go for seconds or snacks between meals, never eat alone. But perhaps most important, eat with pleasure, because eating with anxiety leads to poor digestion and bingeing. There is no French paradox, really, only an American paradox: a notably unhealthy people obsessed with the idea of eating healthily. So, relax. Eat Food. And savor it.

Several readers of my last few posts about eating locally have asked for some resources. Certainly it can feel daunting to leave the familiar confines of the supermarket, where you can find just about everything you want, arranged according to a comfortingly predictable map. Right there by the electronic doors sprawls the garden of fresh produce, while the dairy and meat cases line the far walls, and the great canyons of processed foods bestride the middle of the supermarket. Foraging for food gets much more complicated when you strike out for the farmers’ market (where they don’t take credit cards and you won’t ever find a shopping cart) or, more adventurous yet, head directly to the farm or sign up to join a C.S.A. These “community supported agriculture” farms offer their “subscribers” a weekly box of seasonal produce (sometimes eggs and meat as well), selected by the farmer and either delivered to your door or collected from a drop-off point. The satisfactions of eating this way — non-industrially — are substantial, but there’s no question it involves more thought and effort.

The way we shop and eat is inextricably linked to the kind of agriculture and food system we have, and we won’t change the one before we change the other. The reason organic food producers industrialized was so they could meet the expectations of the supermarket shopper or, as I prefer to think of it, the industrial eater, which is to say most of us. The industrial eater has come to expect strawberries 12 months of the year; tomatoes in January; apples that have been cleaned, sliced and bagged (everything but chewed and digested!); and dinner entrees pre-cooked and sold in individual, microwaveable portions. It takes a globalized, high-energy and large-scale food chain to meet the expectations of such a consumer. By the same token, building a local and sustainable food system will require a very different kind of consumer.

With the help of journalist Jaime Gross, I’ve put together a list of resources to help readers like “Sustainablemom” navigate the local food landscape, wherever you happen to live. We have found excellent Web sites offering general advice on how to meet the challenge of eating locally (see locavores.com), and others with tools that, if you type in your ZIP Code, will point you to farmers in your area growing pastured chickens or organic produce or grass-finished beef (eatwellguide.com). Some of these resources will take you to organizations that aren’t, strictly speaking, local — they aim to support local farms raising traditional breeds and foodstuffs by linking them, through the Internet, to distant consumers (see heritagefoodsusa.com, below). Slow Food (slowfoodusa.org) calls this kind of trade “virtuous globalization,” since it aims to exploit the reach and power of global commerce to defend local treasures from the rising tide of homogenization. There are more of these resources (as well as a downloadable guide) on the links page of my Web site, michaelpollan.com, and I discuss the political implications of shopping this way in the current issue of Mother Jones.

SITES:

Center for Informed Food Choices (informedeating.org) advocates a diet based on whole, unprocessed, local, organically grown plant foods; its Web site contains a useful F.A.Q. page about food politics and eating well, as well as an archive of relevant articles.

Eat Well (eatwellguide.com) is an online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs. Enter your ZIP Code to find healthful, humane and eco-friendly products from farms, stores and restaurants in your area.

Eat Wild (eatwild.com) lists local suppliers for grass-fed meat and dairy products.

Food Routes (foodroutes.org) is a national nonprofit dedicated to “reintroducing Americans to their food — the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it and the routes that carry it from the fields to our tables.”

Heritage Foods USA (heritagefoodsusa.com) sells mail-order ‘traceable’ products from small farms — maple syrup, pole-caught tuna, grass-fed Kobe beef — whose labels provide every detail about how they were produced.

Just Food (justfood.org) works to develop a just and sustainable food system in the New York City region through projects including City Farms (a New York community garden program) and community supported agriculture (which connects regional farmers with produce-hungry city dwellers).

Local Harvest (localharvest.org) offers a definitive and reliable nationwide directory of C.S.A.’s, farmers’ markets, family farms and other local food sources.

Locavores (locavores.com), based in San Francisco, encourages people to eat only foods produced within a 100-mile radius of home. Their Food Web page offers an abundance of additional resources, including books, articles and Web sites.

Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org), a research and action center for the organic and fair-trade food movement, maintains a comprehensive Web archive of articles about genetically engineered foods, cloning, food safety, organics and globalization.

Seafood Watch (mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp) — a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium designed to raise consumer awareness about the importance of buying seafood from sustainable sources — offers a downloadable, pocket-sized, region-by-region guide to eco-friendly seafood.

Slow Food USA (slowfoodusa.org) is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to ecologically sound land stewardship and food production and to living a “slower and more harmonious” life.

Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture (stonebarnscenter.org) is a hands-on educational center and restaurant that aims to demonstrate, teach and promote sustainable, community-based food production on a working farm 30 miles from Manhattan.

Sustainable Table (sustainabletable.org) offers an introduction to the sustainable food movement and the issues surrounding it, plus resources for further investigation (the links for ‘Introduction to Sustainability’ and ‘The Issues’ are good places to start).

The U.S.D.A. Agricultural Marketing Service (ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets) includes a state-by-state listing of farmers’ markets across the United States.

BOOKS:

“This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” by Joan Dye Gussow

“Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers’ Markets,” by Deborah Madison

“Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods,” by Gary Paul Nabhan

Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables, by Farmer John Peterson and Angelic Organics.

“Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm-Fresh Food,” by Joel Salatin

I walked across the street to the farmer’s market and found two stalls offering grass-finished beef from the Hudson Valley. Oddly enough, the New York State beef, which had traveled less than 90 miles from pasture to market, cost more than the New Zealand beef that had come half way around the world. (I’m guessing that Whole Foods buys so much of this type of beef from New Zealand — where it is the rule, not the exception — that it gets a deal; also, the cost of processing local, artisanal meats in an era when the Department of Agriculture won’t support small slaughterhouses adds about a dollar a pound.) In this case, buying local means paying more. Is it worth it?

In this case, and in many others where we get to choose between a local product and a faraway organic one, the answer is yes. I hasten to add “for me.” How you choose to vote with your fork depends on what values matter to you most. In general, if what you care most about is avoiding pesticides in your diet, and keeping pesticides out of the environment, then the choice is clear: you want to buy organic whenever possible. Simple enough. But there are other issues to weigh, and depending on your priorities, these may be just as important as the pesticide issue.

Also, it’s important to realize that the choice is not necessarily either/or — local food is very often organic in all but name (and often even in name), and even Whole Foods occasionally carries local food (but not often enough — more on that later). It’s also not a choice between the Alimentary Good and the Alimentary Evil. Both choices are good ones — we’re lucky to have them — and both represent a better agriculture and demonstrably better food. So no need to agonize about the question, or to demonize Big Organic.

That said, here are my top three arguments for buying local:

1. The food is generally fresher, and in produce, fresher means tastier and more nutritious. The longer produce spends in a truck, the more tired it gets; many of its nutrients — vitamins, anti-oxidents, phytochemicals of all kinds — deteriorate over time. Typically the produce in the farmer’s market has been picked that morning or the day before. All things being equal, any organic produce is often tastier and more nutritious than conventional produce, but after it’s sat on a truck for five days, it may be inferior to that fresh conventionally grown carrot.
2. Local food generally leaves a much lighter environmental footprint. The average fruit or vegetable on an American plate has traveled 1500 miles from the farm, and a lot of diesel fuel has been burned to get it there. Local food has much lower energy costs, and as the era of cheap energy draws to a close, eating local will be more important than ever. Before you buy the Prius, start shopping at your farmer’s market.
3. To buy local is an act of conservation — of the land, of agriculture and of the local economy, all of which are threatened by the globalization of food. Anyone who prizes agricultural landscapes, and worries about sprawl destroying them, should buy local whenever possible. It will do more to defend agricultural landscapes than writing checks to conservation organizations and land trusts does. To buy grass-finished beef from the Hudson Valley or New England is to help protect that beautiful quilted landscape of green pastures tucked into forests and stitched with stone walls. That landscape was created not by the Hudson School painters, but by farmers and their animals and, in turn, by the eaters of those animals. The very best way to defend it is not to have the land trust mow the place to keep it looking the way it should (as is happening in many places), but to keep alive the food chain that created it in the first place. Otherwise the landscape will revert to second-growth forest or housing developments.

The Europeans have a bumper sticker that makes this point in three short words: Eat your view! If you want to preserve those views, then eat from the food chain that created them.

There are others good arguments for buying local whenever you can (please share yours with me), and I’ll address them in future posts. I also plan to offer a list of resources for buying local, as several readers have asked. Stay tuned, and eat your view.