How are our food choices important?

Once upon a time, all it took to make a meal was a simple interaction with nature: People hunted animals and gathered plants to eat.

Things are much different now. Your dinner is the likely product of systems that involve transportation, energy policy, economics, the environment and politics, as well as chemical or biological intervention and myriad other industrial processes.

So the food choices that you make can have real impacts that reach well beyond your kitchen, wallet or dining room.