When I wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics had already helped pique the curiosity of Americans about the system that fed them. Yet in general all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves. (Or as one of my mentors once explained, “Journalists are at best short-term visionaries. Any more than that, no one would read them.”)
