5 Sustainable Food Trends to Watch in 2010: #1 Mainstream Concern about Cheap Food

As I wrote yesterday, 2009 was a great year for sustainable food, but we are only just gearing up for greater things ahead. Over the next five days I will bring you my take on the top five trends to watch in the field of sustainable food as we turn the corner into 2010. There are many more notable things going on than I could include here, but these five stick out to me as particularly important developments to keep an eye on.

Without further ado, I bring you trend #1: growing public concern over cheap food in the United States. With the national discourse focused on health care and our obesity problem, we've had a lot of reason to think about how the food we're eating impacts our health and the health of our environment. And by and large, we don't like what we see.

When TIME runs an article called "Getting Real About the High Cost of Cheap Food" and Newsweek publishes "How the Government Should Support Local Farms," you can't deny that this topic has legs. On top of that, more and more attention is being drawn to our unsustainable food system via press about tainted meat, salmonella-laced foods, the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup, the connections between obesity and fast food and the fact that Americans tend to eat unhealthily.

We eat unhealthily largely because our industrial food system processes subsidized corn into food-like stuff that we place at the center of our diets where fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains should be. To the health-conscious or those active in food politics, that statement will come as no surprise. But to much of the American public, it's revolutionary to think that our entire system is geared toward creating the wrong kind of food. That thought-revolution is starting to occur, and I look forward to watching it progress apace in 2010.

Stay tuned for trend #2 tomorrow!

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