The supermarket food gamble may be up

``The brief disappearance of a few green and salad vegetables was hardly a great deprivation, but we should take it seriously as an early warning sign. Like the banking system, our food system seems too big, too sophisticated and too embedded in everyday life to fail. Yet privately, supermarket buyers have been talking for at least five years about "choice editing" -- that is, editing out some of the fresh foods we have come to take for granted because importing them is unsustainable. Examples might include asparagus from Peru, 95% of which comes from the Ica valley where wells are running dry, and Moroccan tomatoes sourced from areas suffering severe water stress and aquifer depletion.''