If you grew up on an island anywhere in America, or along any remote rural coastline, you can relate to one of Jenny’s Cirone’s pithy observations.

Jenny was a crusty, independent Maine woman from Cape Split, South Addison, an out-of-the-way Downeast fishing harbor roughly halfway between Pigeon Hill Bay and Moosabec Reach—in other words, if you have to ask, you can’t get there.

Reflecting on her life as a lobster-woman, clam digger, mackerel jigger, flounder fisher, smelt dipper, sheep raiser, blueberry raker, cider-presser and fiddlehead picker, she summed up her life as, “We didn’t have much, but we sure had plenty.” Maine was always a poor state and agriculture was hard, but you don’t hear of many people along the coast going hungry during those days even during the worst of times.

That was back before the family farm became the corporate farm, and Maine farmers either moved west or gave up moving stones out of hard worked fields. Before small boats became big boats, re-powered with huge new engines and equipped with the full flower of Cold War submarine hunting technology, repurposed to find and catch the last fish in our oceans.

For most of the past two decades now, you could hardly find a fresh cod fillet in any island store in the Gulf of Maine—or in America for that matter—not to mention a local egg, apple or chicken.

Gorton’s, the fish company headquartered in the country’s oldest fishing community, Gloucester, Mass., figured out how to turn a school of cod into a commodity. Catch them where they aggregate to spawn in any of the cold seas of the world, freeze them, saw them into blocks, bread them, cook them and feed them to the millions.

The great beauty of this business is that anywhere you eat them, a fish stick is a fish stick. And if one local stock is depleted, don’t worry, there are always other cod grounds somewhere to make the business model work.

But then something happened to change attitudes. Not overnight, but in slow motion. The change began with a concern about how what pesticides we may be ingesting that have been sprayed on crops to control insects pests, fungi, nematodes, slugs—and an increasing number of other creatures that have not been invited to our dinner tables.

Then, a few gastronomes began to complain about the loss of flavor in square tomatoes that had been genetically engineered to stay ripe for weeks between field and table. Then it began to seem extravagant to serve strawberries flown in from Central America on shortcake in the winter.

Then other cranky do-gooders began to calculate the carbon footprint of a Granny Smith apple flown in from New Zealand, not to mention an Atlantic salmon grown on a farm in the Pacific ocean in Chile, fattened on a diet of forage fish no longer available to feed local people and local fish. And did you hear the story about growth hormones in your food? And so on and so forth until we find ourselves in the midst of a full-fledged food fight.

 All along, we have been told that economic efficiency trumps all these concerns—it is the price we pay for feeding the world—and for cheap food at home. A fish stick on every plate—or at least once a week on Fridays.

The Green Revolution, the American agricultural model exported to the world, is based on planting genetically improved seeds, followed by strict applications of fertilizers and pesticides and watered by ever-deeper wells. It has brought a generation-worth of food security to hundreds of millions in places like India. But unfortunately, it has not been a free lunch. The other side of this abundance, we are beginning to recognize is depleted aquifers, crushing debt loads, income inequalities, increased rural unemployment and a need for ever more investments in the next generation of genetically modified seeds, more potent pesticides and expensive fertilizers to maintain productivity. The treadmill is speeding up and some farmers are able to keep up. Get bigger or get out. Same story in fishing.

But recently a whole new generation of mostly young people has said, “enough.” Called by such names as “locavores,” these people are starting to ask where their food, including their fish, is coming from. Are fishing and farming businesses from which we buy based on sustainable harvesting methods?

It can take an advanced degree to figure out if Chilean sea bass is in reality a Patagonian toothfish, a species that has been industrially mined in vast ocean expanses beyond national controls; or is it something else—maybe a tilapia, raised in a fish pond of unknown water quality? And if the Chilean sea bass is a Patagonia toothfish, was it caught off the remote Kerguelen, South Georgia or Falkland (Maldives) Islands that have been certified as sustainably caught or from an illegal operation?

Closer to home, the food revolution has arrived on the Maine islands. There are farmer’s markets on even the smallest, rockiest, most remote islands, such as Monhegan.

And why not? Captain John Smith, who camped on Monhegan for months at a time in 1614 and 1615 while fishing in the nearby waters, wrote enthusiastically about the tasty salads they ate from a garden they planted in May, and which produced fresh vegetables for him and his crew during the following two months. Believe me, if you can grow vegetables on Monhegan—and you can—you can grow them anywhere on this rocky coast with a little effort and ingenuity.

But ultimately food security is about more that fresh lettuce that has not been sprayed with unknown chemicals. It is about eating what the local environment provides.

As farmer’s markets make a comeback on remote windswept ramparts of the outer islands, we also ought to be able to find a fresh filet of cod, haddock or halibut from Gulf of Maine—not from some remote place like the Barents of Bering Sea. And local clams and mussels from unpolluted flats and oysters from clean brackish streams and rivers and local crab and shrimp. That is the real test of food security.

We may not make much, but it should be plenty.

Philip Conkling is the founder and president of the Island Institute.