It was in reading Berry that I came across a particular line that formed a template for much of my work: "eating is an agricultural act." It's a line that urges you to connect the dots between two realms—the farm, and the plate—that can seem very far apart. We must link our eating, in other words, to the way our food is grown. In a way, all my writing about food has been about connecting dots in the way Berry asks of us. It's why, when I write about something like the meat industry, I try to trace the whole long chain: from your plate to the feedlot, and from there to the corn field, and from there to the oil fields in the Middle East. Berry reminds us that we're part of a food system, and we need to think about our eating with this fact—and its implications—in mind.

Ultimately, this revelation led to a change in my career. I was an editor at Harper's, and I loved editing magazines. I didn't think it was ever realistic that I could make a living as a writer, but my editorial work—helping writers with their prose, watching the process of revision, finding a narrative paths through a complex subject—made me increasingly curious to try it myself. I didn't have a subject until I kind of hit on the garden by mistake. And by engaging with my own agricultural struggle on a small scale, I became reoriented: I learned a way of thinking and living that I didn't know before. I wanted to write more and more about the agricultural and political realities I am joined to by my eating. Eventually, I didn't have time to both write and edit and I had to make a choice. I really did come to a fork in the road, and I decided I wanted to write.

I started doing a series of pieces for The New York Times Magazine on the meat industry and genetically modified food. And as I started to connect these dots myself, I was shocked by what I found. The Omnivore's Dilemma partially grew out of my experience of standing in a feedlot and seeing a landscape that very few people in America had seen (especially on the east coast). I stood in a potato field in Idaho, a 35,000-acre farm that was completely remote-controlled, with regular showers of pesticides so toxic that the farmer's didn't enter his fields. I had no idea that this was how we grew food. I was an Easterner—and farms in the east are tiny and still kinda cute. I realized—if I don't know this, lots of people don't know this. The way our food was being grown was being deliberately hidden from us in many cases. They don't make it easy to visit these feedlots. And much of my work grew out of a sense of shock at the picture that emerges when you do connect the dots.

Because, in recent years, as more people have been wakened to questions about how their food is being produced, we're seeing all kinds of obfuscations. We're in a race between getting good accurate information out there and the obscuring brilliance of marketing. They're showing you a package of eggs with a farmer and a picket fence—what I call "supermarket pastoral"—but behind that beautiful image, and your belief that you're supporting that kind of agriculture, there's really a factory farm. These ag-gag laws? The fact you're not allowed to take pictures of these places and expose their brutality? It's a remarkable assault on the First Amendment. This is all about who gets to tell the story of how food is produced, and the industry wants exclusive rights to that story.