Feeding America

In 1776 almost every American was a farmer. Food was local because it could not be anything else, seasonal because there was no alternative, and preserved by salt, smoke, and cellar or not preserved at all. Two and a half centuries later the United States runs the most productive agricultural system in human history and exports its eating habits to every continent. The story between those two points is the story of a country that learned to feed itself, then fed a continent, then fed much of the world—and now, at 250, is arguing about what that abundance has cost.