ABSTRACT
Introduction Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States transformed from a mostly local, agrarian society to an industrialized national market. With this transformation, the citizens began to rely not on themselves to grow the food that they were going to consume, but on nonlocal corporations that could distribute the food from farms to distant cities. The lengthening of the supply chain increased the likelihood that the food actually reaching consumers was not of the same purity and quality as when it left the farm.1
