Yet another snack that originated from the food safety conference last month. When the representative from the CDC was speaking, he was talking about all of the difficulty in tracking outbreaks on a national scale. One of the things that he noted was that if 10 people who ordered the same dish in a restaurant in a small town on Tuesday all get sick on either Wednesday or Thursday with the same symptoms, then it’s not hard to trace the source. The difficulty comes in when you have a national outbreak with cases sporadically strewn across the nation. It’s much more difficult to diagnose food-borne illness when the patients have never met each other, their respective doctors don’t know each other, and there is no reason to think that the person is sick from something that they ate rather than from some other source. The curious thing is that these types of nation-wide outbreaks only occur because products are shipped from a single producer to retailers all over the country – so if it’s contaminated when it leaves the packaging plant, it’s contaminated in dozens of stores across several states.
I’m not necessarily advocating that we all buy local, but it does seem that life would be a lot simpler if we did. This lead me to pondering what God thinks of globalization. Globalization is good for consumers because it gives us greater variety and better prices. It's bad for consumers because it causes more pollution, more potential for spreading disease, and fewer local jobs in areas that are not productive enough to attract large-scale businesses. When I put it like that, globalization doesn’t look so great. It's not enough to effect a drastic change in my behavior, but it does make me wonder if this is the sort of thing that God was getting at in these scriptures:
Micah 4:4
Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.