Pictures of piles of potatoes are circulating right now. Sorry for the overzealous alliterating, but unprecedented quantities of free potatoes are up for grabs in Idaho and Washington, the top two potato-producing states in the U.S. These potatoes—a billion pounds of Russets in Washington warehouses (sorry, again)—would typically find their way to restaurants, schools, or other commercial venues, perhaps in the form of French fries. But this year is a rather atypical year…

The word corn actually means a region’s most important cereal crop. Zea mays, or maize, is ours, the conflation of the two words proof of its place at the heart of our country and culture. The act of tracing the history of corn in America helped me to make sense of our current overreliance and overproduction of the crop. Corn is so deeply yet invisibly embedded in our society, with origins in the colonial era both fueling and explaining its ubiquity now. Early American…

How does it come to be, the author of Tomatoland posits, that a third of America’s tomatoes are grown in a locale that is perhaps least conducive to their growth? Florida’s soil is effectively sand, its climate is prone to pests, its land devoid of nitrogen and ill-equipped to hold water. The state is occasionally besieged by hurricanes and often faces temperature swings. Yet one out of three of our tomatoes come from Florida, the very same site where tomato pickers…