The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all about the marbling and maybe a few other things along the way. But intramuscular fat, that's where you get a lot of flavor. Fat carries the flavor but in the last 50 years it's been bred out of pigs. When American chicken exploded in the 70's and became such a huge commodity, it took away pork sales. The pork industry suffered and had to change.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.