10 U.S. food policy destinations

For people who want to know where their food comes from, Google Maps offers a profound passport to the landscape you choose to view, in place of the pastoral image that an interested party wants you to view. For most of these locations, you can explore even more using the street view feature.

10. The world's largest pork slaughterhouse, the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, NC, where workers are voting this month on a collective contract after years of company resistance to union organizing. For what it's worth, the Rolling Stone magazine doesn't think so highly of Smithfield.


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9. Center-pivot irrigated fields drawing from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being depleted by municipal and agricultural use.


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8. Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Virginia.


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7. The largest urban community farm in the United States, 14 acres in South Central Los Angeles, topic of the documentary movie, now bulldozed this year.


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6. Phosphate strip mines and accompanying retention lagoons in the Bone Valley in Florida, generator of mountains upon mountains of slightly radioactive phosphogypsum waste that nobody knows how to dispose safely, source of 75% of phosphate used in U.S. agriculture, and hence an essential engine of agricultural industrialization.


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5. The Canada / U.S. border between Montana and Saskatchewan. What makes this view fascinating is that this border was drawn along a line of latitude, not according to the landscape, so there is no fundamental natural difference in the land on the two sides of the border. Use the left and right scroll key to range for hundreds of miles in either direction and absorb a deep lesson in how policy influences the way land is used.


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4. Farmland conversion to suburban style housing developments in eastern Pennsylvania, near the farm where my grandfather grew up and where my wife and I were married outdoors, with cows mooing nearby. Am I understanding this image correctly? Perhaps Google Maps has updated its street database more quickly than its satellite images, so that this image superimposes the names of the environmentally foolhardy cul-de-sac style subdivision streets over the slightly older satellite image of (on the left) the construction sites and (on the right) the farms that once were there?


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3. Pineapple countryside in Hawaii, just because it's pretty.


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2. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in North Carolina.


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1. In the Iowa heartland, the little 1-mile distance indicator ruler from Google Maps is redundant.


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Please contribute your own additions to this list in the comments section.