this is worth reading

it's british based, but it applies here as well. don't be fooled.

10 Things We Didn’t Know About Food
How the authors of the new Rough Guide to Food lost their appetites for the food industry.
by George Miller and Katharine Reeve
A surprise consequence of writing a book about food was that we lost our appetite. A month in, we realised we had underestimated just how devastating the effects of our industrial food systems are on our health, animal welfare, climate change and the earth's resources. Thankfully, a few trips to some farmers markets with their good news story of artisan baking, handmade cheeses and fresh-from-the-ground veg offered the escapism we needed and helped provide a sense of perspective.

Food, lies and red tape

Overwhelmingly we found that most of us simply don't know much about food, having grown up knowing only supermarkets. In our confusion we are at the mercy of food manufacturers' aggressive marketing campaigns, especially for highly profitable "healthy" foods.

The Food Standards Agency and the EU are now challenging manufacturers' health claims. Yakult, we discovered, is essentially overpriced sweetened water with added bacteria marketed as a probiotic health drink (check the label: we naively assumed it was diluted live yoghurt!). Why spend your money on foods that are not all they're cracked up to be? Become a label checker and edit your shopping list: a good rule of thumb is the fewer and simpler the ingredients the better. .........

i've written about the chocolate industry before. never hurts to remind us about it from time to time

..........Bitter chocolate

The extent of child labour in the cocoa industry came as a shock. It's especially prevalent in the world's leading producers in West Africa. Côte d'Ivoire, the biggest grower, has more than 100,000 child workers often enduring slave labour conditions involving the use of dangerous pesticides and machetes. There's also cross-border child trafficking. The multi-billion-pound "Big Chocolate" industry hasn't shown much interest in cleaning up its supply chain. Another good reason to choose Fairtrade. .............