“One garden salad to go, hold the oil” by Roger Doiron (Oct. 9) did a great job showing the nonsense of shipping the average American meal 1,500 miles before it lands on our plates. Buying food locally from Maine farmers makes sense in saving gasoline as well as providing Maine jobs. But it missed another important reason for changing the food system – security.

Currently, our food is grown in multinational, monocrop farms, where it is available to spraying with poisons. It is shipped in large tankers that could easily be bombed. It is stored on container docks, ready for any terrorist. It is loaded into 100-car-long railroad trains, easily derailed. And sold from large superstores, available for all kinds of devastation.

Of course, each of these steps has a profit motive with close ties to Washington lobbyists. But where are our food critics, 9/11 commissions and newspapers, who are so concerned with the terrorist threat?

Bill Ellis, Rangeley