Yes, a cheeseburger and fries is probably my favourite meal. But I don't eat ground beef anymore.

So for everything I do, I'm very clear about what I'm doing, and I tell people what it's about. They get a sense of what I'm thinking. I don't let people think I'm going to write something in praise in the meatpacking industry, and then they read it and it's actually attacking the meatpacking industry.

There's also a growing trend toward having gardens in schools to literally show kids where food comes from by having them grow and prepare their own food. There's also a movement that's bringing farmers into schools and creating relationships between local farms and local cafeterias, so that instead of frozen mystery meat, you have fresh produce that's coming from the area that has a name and a face associated with it.

The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this.

Kids have no idea when they're drinking soda what they're really drinking, and a lot of them are stunned when they learn that drinking a Big Gulp is like taking a big jar of sugar and just pouring it down. There are 50 teaspoons of sugar in a 64-ounce Big Gulp.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.