A column I wrote last year about global warming prompted an email from a reader who told me I was not taking into account rising food prices.

I thought he was overstating his case because he didn’t agree with me. I was wrong.

Clearly rising food prices are a problem as I note in a column for tomorrow. How much biofuels are contributing to the increase is under debate (as with most things) but people point to Congress’ energy bill and the demand for nonfossil fuels. But the price of oil seems also to be contributing factor, so change will come one way or the other.

At the same time, this country makes enormous use of high-fructose corn syrup, possible because of farm subsidies.

If the world is getting too little food, we Americans get too much—processed food, fast food, high in fat and sugar and salt.

A pastor in Mount Vernon, the Rev. Hugh Farrish, is making fresh vegetables available to poor families and senior citizens. He plants 12 acres up in Goshen each year.

I interviewed him last week, wrote about him for tomorrow and thought of him this past weekend when I wandered into my local farmers market. I bought spinach and was on my way out when I noticed one of the workers refilling the bin. From a plastic bag of spinach that looked like it came from a supermarket! How stupid did I feel. I don’t know why I bought it in the first place. I knew there was no spinach growing around here. It is after all April. But that’s what happens when you’re removed from the source of your food.

This week some restaurants in New York City began posting calorie counts on their menu boards. Restaurants have been in court fighting this new requirement and so some are still not complying. Before I stopped eating meat, I occasionally ate a Big Mac with medium fries and a small soda. Nine hundred plus calories—and that was just lunch.

Lots of people think the requirement is silly. Unnecessary. We should already know that fast food is not health food, is their reasoning. So I stood outside a McDonald’s in Manhattan yesterday morning and asked a couple of people what they thought of it. Would it make a difference to them?

“I would think so,” Steven Allen, a 50-year-old truck driver from New Jersey, said as he headed in. “I’d know how many calories to burn off.”

Melody Woods, 30, and an office assistant at the nearby New York Presbyterian Hospital was coming out with a sausage, egg and cheese McGriddle. That’s 560 calories—though the restaurant hadn’t posted the calories yet. You still have to look it up.

It wasn’t something she normally ordered, she said, but she was hungry. Would her choices change?

“Maybe,” she said. “What I shouldn’t order. It might make me stay away.”

FILE PHOTO: Hugh Farrish, pastor of Bowen Memorial Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, poses with an 83-pound watermelon that he grew. (Photo by Rohanna Mertens)