The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.