As An Investigative Reporter, I'm Trying To

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.

Future Historians, I Hope, Will Consider The American Fast Food Industry A Relic Of The Twentieth Century--a Set Of Attitudes, Systems, And Beliefs That Emerged From Postwar Southern California, That Embodied Its Limitless Faith In Technology, That Quickly Spread Across The Globe, Flourished Briefly, And Then Receded, Once Its True Costs Became Clear And Its Thinking Became Obsolete.

Basically, I'm A Perpetual Student. I Start By Finding A Subject I Really Don't Know Very Much, But That I'm Curious About. I Learn About It Through Books In A Library, By Doing Interviews With People Who Know A Lot About The Subject, And By Going Out On My Own And Seeing For Myself What's Happening.

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.

I'd Been Eating Fast Food All My Life Without Thinking About It. And The More I Learned About The Subject, The More Intrigued I Became.