I write a lot about food, and about topics like people who grow local food and those who cook it. These stories are mostly happy, positive tales about a topic that most people enjoy. Food brings us together, and as a farming state, we like to tell ourselves stories that bolster our state myth of Iowa as a breadbasket, of verdant hills and rich black soil and the people who tend it.But just underneath the surface of that soil is a much more complex story.