“You live here, you know the drive well: It’s a veritable candy store wasteland of prisons and landfills and toxic waste sites and massive, politically corrupt aqueducts, huge industrial farms and enormous ranches and depressing tule fog and vast swaths of bland nothingness all around, and it’s dotted all the way down with weird little forgotten farming/industrial towns you will never ever visit except perhaps to refuel and empty your bladder as you wonder how the hell they get all that garbage food out to those endless Jack in the Box and Carl’s Jr. and creepy overlit Del Taco outlets in the middle of nowhere.

Oh yes, the meat. It is right there, writ large and reeking and utterly undeniable as you cruise down I-5 and I don’t mean just in the staggering, gluttonous array of greasy junk-food joints. I mean right there, the actual source itself, that famous and semi-gourmet bastion of manure and methane and meat known as the Harris Ranch, just off the freeway by a town called Coalinga. What a thing.

You know the place. Or rather, you know the stench. It is 800 acres and a whopping 100,000 head of truly miserable-looking cattle, all bunched together in one very dejected herd, right alongside a half-mile stretch of freeway, and every other cow has its head bowed to the ground munching on what appears to be, in contrast to the sweet grassy fields spread out for miles around, grayish dirt. “