I am, by nature, a very skeptical person. Which comes in handy in the fitness and nutrition worlds, where ardently-claimed but scientifically-bankrupt stupidity abounds.

That’s why, though I grew up in the Bay Area, even at one point attended a summer camp where we had to ‘thank the spirit of the water’ each time we flushed the toilet, I’ve long been skeptical of the whole ‘farm to table’ movement.

I’d written off a lot of the appeal as hipster nonsense – the twee fetishizing of the ’craftsmen’ ethos. Sure, buying at a farmer’s market allows you to vicariously live a small slice of the farmers’ neo-luddite life. But farmers’ market food is, well, still just food.

Turns out, I was totally wrong.

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending more time learning about the mechanics of the global food production system, and its impact on the nutrition of what we eat.

Consider an apple. You see them, year-round, in large piles at every grocery store. Appealingly glossy, perfectly ripe, available organically-raised in an endless array of varieties.

But here’s something you probably don’t think about when you see them: those apples are old. Really, really old.

In fact, on average, the apples in your grocery store, whether organic or not, were picked ten months ago. Then they were stored in extreme cold for months and months. Cold generated using a mix of gasses that are so toxic that produce workers intermittently die just from going in to the apple storage freezers with a leak in their protective gear.

And even if that gas doesn’t permeate the apple itself, the effects of time certainly do.

By the time you pick that apple off your grocery store shelf, it has less than 10% of the micro-nutrient content than it did a week after it was plucked. In other words, we spend huge amounts of money converting a vitamin-packed healthy snack into a empty-calorie sugar bomb.

So, what can you do? That’s where farmer’s markets come in. The food you’re buying there this week was, on average, picked within the last two weeks. Which, when it comes to nutritional content, is a world of difference. Plus it tastes better, too. And, in most cases, it even costs less than the stuff you can find in-store.

So, it appears, I’ve circled back to my hippy roots after all. I’ve resolved to shop for more produce (and meat and cheese and more) at my local farmer’s market this year. You can find ones near you with this handy USDA tool, and I’d encourage you to do the same.