"Ideally, you want to look the person who is growing the food in the eye, and then you really know where the food came from and how did the chicken that laid the eggs live, But not everybody wants to meet the chickens. So we need some surrogates to meet the chickens for us, particularly in parts of the country where you might live far away from farmland. We're inventing different possibilities for that, and the Internet is one of them."

--Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan, quoted in a NYTimes story by Michelle Slatella on buying local, organic produce online for home delivery.