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The road we have traveled to our current state of eating is actually a very long, interconnected highway. After World War II, American national security strategists decided that protecting the homeland required building a network of broad interstates that mirrored the German Autobahn. This monumental road-building project—now close to 47,000 miles long—was initially conceived as a way to efficiently move troops and military machinery, but it has also had dramatic peacetime consequences for the American landscape, and for the American diet.
 
Suddenly, big, safe interstates—and the millions of miles of ring roads, state roads, and town roads they encouraged—allowed people to live farther and farther from the cities where they worked. People moved out of cities in droves, looking for new places to live. Land prices outside cities skyrocketed, and small farmers occupying that land had a hard time resisting when real estate developers came to call.
 
Suburban development hit small American farms like a virus. In the 1950s alone, some 10 million people left family farms. Chances are, your grandparents (or even your parents) can tell you stories about all those farms in your area that over the last few decades have been turned into subdivisions and shopping malls. In Maryland, where I live, suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years.
 
All these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like Mc-Donald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the new highways like weeds. By the early 1960s, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the largest restaurant chain in the United States.
 
These restaurants did not cook, exactly; what they did was heat up highly processed, prepackaged foods that tasted exactly the same, whether you were in Dallas or Des Moines. The ingredients didn’t need to be fresh, they needed to be uniform, and storable, and—most important, given skyrocketing demand—they needed to be provided in vast quantities.
 
Fast-food joints didn’t need local asparagus from New Jersey or collard greens from Georgia or one-of-a-kind apples grown in small orchards in New York. They needed commodity grains to sweeten their sodas, fry their fries, and feed the animals that could be turned into hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. What these restaurants needed was corn, and wheat, and soybeans. And lots of them.
 
As small family farms near population centers went bankrupt or sold their land to developers, and as the American diet started demanding processed meals, food production flowed like beads of mercury to the control of larger and larger industrial farm operations in the Midwest. As food production became centralized, companies that controlled the grains, chemicals, and processing factories became bigger and much more politically powerful. Thanks to intensive lobbying, tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies began flowing to giant agribusinesses that were driving the development of the industrial food system. As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to “get big or get out.”
 
Most farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many work on farms? Two percent.
 
Today, if you drive across the grain belt—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas—you will spend many, many hours crossing an ocean of just three crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans. They are being grown by farmers you will likely never meet, processed in factories you will likely never see, into packaged foods containing ingredients that look nothing like the crops from which they were made. You won’t see it, but your soda will be sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, which replaced sugar in the 1980s. Your fries will be dunked in boiling soybean oil. And your burgers and nuggets and sliced turkey breast will all be processed from animals fed corn or soybeans, or both.
 
What you most likely won’t see, out along on the great American road system, are regional food specialties, or the mom-and-pop diners and restaurants that used to serve them. New England clam chowder, New Orleans gumbo, Maryland crab bisque: all these foods require local ingredients, which (by definition) giant farms in Iowa or Kansas are unable to provide. Replacing them has been the food that these farms can provide: Fast food. Processed food. Soda. Pizza. Chicken nuggets. Cheap hamburgers. A vast culinary sameness, all essentially built out of two or three crops, controlled by a small handful of companies. All available twenty-four hours a day in any restaurant, dining hall, or gas station in the country.