An article in the New Yorker about the issues surrounding establishing a carbon footprint says it bluntly: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” Author Michael Specter cites the Clean Air Act of 1990, which was a great triumph—reducing emissions from 18 million to 9 million—and the also successful Clean Water Act of 1972, which obliged factories that polluted water to pay penalties. Because our current system is so heavily weighted in favor of agribusiness (with full, even excessive, government support), there isn’t currently enough incentive for most people to buy better food on a bigger scale. As Minnesota farmer Jack Hedin laments in a straight-forward New York Times op-ed, “the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding.” His own experience trying to lease a cornfield on which to grow fruit exposes how the rules buttressing commodity subsidies actively prevent local and regional fruit and vegetable production.

The small-farm-local-foods movement, a little David against a big Goliath, has done admirably well on its own, but it’ll take more than a slingshot to change the titanic momentum the food system has created as it industrialized over the past fifty years.