A few months ago, my colleague Spencer Millsap and I decided we wanted to see the distribution system at work. We wanted to trace the massive journey food travels to reach markets thousands of miles away. And there was no better food to follow than the strawberry, one of the planet’s most perishable crops. Every country around the world eats strawberries, but nobody eats more strawberries than Americans. The plan was to literally follow a strawberry truck the entire journey, from the field in Watsonville to a supermarket in Washington, D.C. The goal was to keep pace on a journey that occurs thousands of times a day, never seen but almost always on schedule.

On any given day, around half a