“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.