Over here in the US, they have an interesting grocery shopping alternative, called CSA (community supported agriculture). How it runs is that you pay the farmers first, and they use the advanced money to run their farm. In return, you get what they can harvest from the field, so it's not the same every week. Sometimes there is less and sometimes there is more. Usually the food is local, organic, only what is available in season, and the farms are small and personal.

It sounds kind of fun, if you're tired of iffy food production and not-exactly-honest production principles, this is the way you can actually see where it comes from, most farms have family days where you can visit the farm too. It's nice to see some families subscribe to CSAs to educate their kids about where their food comes from and help them grow up eating healthy whole foods too.

Some people think CSAs are just a hype that will go away, but I think at least it's a little resistance against the over-industrialisation of food production nowadays, if anything it can help show businesses and policy makers the changing wants of the public and that they are starting to become more educated about food safety, environmental issues, and about how food production subsidies streamed in the wrong direction ends up having you to pay up in other ways (healthcare and such).

Here are the websites of 2 of the more popular CSAs around San Francisco, if you want to have a look at how it's done: Terra Firma , Eatwell