Lately, it seems, we can't go a month without another gigantic food recall of some sort. One month we've got to throw out all the ground beef in our freezers, the next it's all the leaf lettuce or spinach in our crisper drawers.

The sizes of these recalls are staggering. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of food are wasted because of poor handling practices, poor sanitation or simple inattention to detail.

So, what's the best way to make sure that you can keep the food you buy, and even eat it, without fear of a bacterial apocalypse striking your GI tract?

If you watch any of the thousands of police procedural shows that populate every night's TV schedule, you're probably familiar with the term "chain of custody." In police-speak, that means the line of people who have their hands on a particular piece of evidence from the time it's found to the time it's in court. I'm sure I flubbed that somewhere; I'm not a lawyer. But you get the idea. A similar chain of custody is involved when it comes to your food.

The safest course is to minimize the number of steps your food takes between the field or pasture and your table. For fruit and veggies, that means weekly trips to your local farmer's market. But did you know that many markets also sell meat? Local ranchers sell their wares, and the person you buy it from will likely be one of the people working on the ranch during the week. You won't get closer than that without becoming a cattle rustler.

If your farmer's market doesn't have a meat counter or two, ask your local agriculture office. They should have a listing of local producers who sell to the public.

Local meat will likely cost a bit more than what you buy at the local megamart. But what you'll get will be fresher meat that did not go through some giant processing plant where millions of pounds of meat a week are processed.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not sounding the alarm bell about the entire U.S. food system. We still have one of the safest, most tightly inspected setups in the world. The chances that the meat or other comestible you buy is crawling with something that will kill you is miniscule. However, when something does go wrong, it tends to do so in a big and special way. That's the nature of the system. A staggering percentage of our food is produced, processed, packaged and purveyed by giant corporations that handle more food in a day than you'll see in your lifetime.

For my dollar, I'd rather get a carrot with some field dirt still on it, potatoes with the tops still attached or a T-bone steak sold to me by the man who carved it.

A good friend in the sustainable agriculture community here in the Charlotte, N.C. area gave me a bumper sticker that says "Local Food -- Thousands Of Miles Better." I think that just about says it all.

Got a question? Comment? Topic you'd like to see covered? Drop me a line, anytime!