The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Today Churdan is virtually a ghost town, much of its main street shuttered. The barbershop, a food market, and the local movie theater have all closed in recent years; there’s a café and one sparsely stocked little market somehow still hanging on, but most people drive the ten miles to Jefferson to buy their groceries or pick up milk and eggs when they’re getting gas at the Kum & Go. The middle school can no longer field a baseball team or put together a band, it has so few students left, and it takes four local high schools to field a single football team: the Jefferson-Scranton-Paton-Churdan Rams. Just about the only going concern left standing in Churdan is the grain elevator, rising at the far end of town like a windowless concrete skyscraper. It endures because, people or no people, the corn keeps coming, more of it every year.