‘Ethical eating’ has taken the food world by storm, but the farms that produce most of our food have changed very little. Thank goodness. Ten years on, it is hard to think of a book that has influenced the public conversation on food more, and Pollan in his foreword is too modest about the impact of his masterpiece. As a farmer, I’ve participated in this discussion, in the same way a pig participates in a pig roast, though I should be clear that the pig roast is a metaphor, because no dedicated disciple of Pollan would ever attend such an event — unless the pig had a backstory complete with pastures, bucolic nature, local origins, and a life worthy of E. B. White’s Wilbur. In the wake of Pollan’s blockbuster success, the main course on the food movement’s menu has become the “industrial” farmer, a farmer like me, who specializes in only a couple of crops or animals and uses the latest technology to grow his wares economically. Although identified with the political Left, the movement Pollan inspired is profoundly conservative, if one defines conservatism as a nostalgia for a romanticized past that existed only in children’s storybooks and in the reminiscences of forgetful farm wives. Pollan today is happy that he’s helped move “the question at the heart of [his] book” to the “heart of our culture.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a journalist whose only experience in agriculture is the four years he spent writing the book. Clearly, as Pollan notes, the public was already questioning the food system as it existed in 2006. But as I sit here on my front porch, surrounded by the kind of “monoculture” that food activists detest, I’m struck by how little has changed in the process by which genetically modified seed hits heavily fertilized soil. We’re still raising corn and soybeans, even more than we did in 2006. In fact, in 2016, farmers planted 94 million acres of corn in the United States (as Pollan himself notes), up from the 78 million we planted in 2006. Soybean planting has increased from 64 million acres to more than 80 million acres.