The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products—CDs, say, or shoes—there’s a natural limit to how much food we can each consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year—1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is that Wall Street won’t tolerate such an anemic rate of growth. This leaves companies like
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