Last month the country shuddered with fear at yet another salmonella outbreak, this time in a half billion eggs distributed across the nation and infecting more than a thousand people.  The news media buzzed with worry and dismay at how this could happen, and wrung its hands over the safety of our food supply. When even a humble egg is a threat, what’s a poor consumer to do?

Unless, of course, you buy locally-grown eggs from independent farmers, whether at a farmers’ market, or an enlightened local grocer—in that case, you didn’t experience one whit of worry. No worry about batch numbers, production dates or contaminated brands, in that case. In fact, it was as if the whole scare was happening to another country entirely, a country of people who have been shopping in the wrong place for a long time now.

Local food is fresher, tastier, better for the local economy and community, and often less expensive. On top of that, it’s safer. Not only do we believe that local farmers are more likely to be careful stewards of our food than massive food conglomerates, but even if there is a health issue, with local food networks it is simply not possible for the kind of nation-wide contagion outbreaks that continue to dog our modern food system. As with any ecosystem, the more diverse system is more robust.

From the vantage point of 2010, it’s hard to imagine why we’d ever believe that a few big companies controlling our food supply would be a good idea, but here we are. We got to this point in stages, duped a little at a time in a long-ago age when mechanization and technology seemed like herald angels of a better world, not just twin henchmen of corporate profit.

The good news is, the system is easier to undo than it was to create. Seacoast Local encourages us all to make the “10% Shift” and reroute 10 percent of our spending to local businesses, which is a great program and makes the idea of buying local less daunting. In the case of food especially, though, why not just make the 100 percent shift? Buying local might seem like a massive lifestyle change, but really it’s just one decision that you make when you pull out your wallet to buy a dozen eggs. Then, next time you pull out your wallet to buy some fish… or a tomato… make the same decision again.

Welcome to a better world.

Enter the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic word reading device thing. The third-generation version is selling in record numbers, according to Amazon, and along with Apple’s iPad it now seems inevitable that “eBooks” are the way of the future, the sort of thing embedded in the zeitgeist that it would be foolish to fight.

For any community that still has vibrant independent bookstores (like the Seacoast) it’s hard to imagine any reader worth their salt switching to eBooks, but for some there is an understandable chain of logic. In many communities, the independent bookstore might have gone out of business long ago, plowed under by the big-box chain bookstore at the mall, so readers adapted to the inferior service and the decline of their local literary community. Once you’ve adapted to Barnes & Noble, buying your books from Amazon.com and never interacting with a human being at all might seem like a blessing, and from there it’s a short hop to an eBook reader, since at least you don’t have to wait for the delivery truck to bring your book. And after all, it’s the words that matter, not the paper it’s printed on… right?

Or maybe we’re being duped all over again.

When you make your trip to the farmers’ market this week, think about whether or not we’re really going to be happy decades from now (or sooner) when all the writing of the world is consolidated into a few digital distribution systems controlled by a handful of companies, and our intellectual culture becomes only as robust and enduring as the batteries that power it and the quarterly earnings that it generates for the rich.