Following the corn-based industrial food chain had taken me on a journey of several thousand miles, from George Naylor’s Iowa fields to the feedlots and packing plants of Kansas, through any number of far-flung food processors before ending up in a Marin County McDonald’s. After that, it didn’t surprise me to read that the typical item of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.
