Yul Kwon standing in front of a lot of corn.

Host Yul Kwon starts PBS’ new series, America Revealed off saying “in every part of my life, I’ve been fascinated by the same things – systems and networks.” Well, not only am I also fascinated with systems, the first episode touches on something that – obviously – is pretty high up my list of passions: it is about how gigantic, how remarkable and yet how wasteful the modern food industry can be. The first ten minutes includes cool visual maps tracking New York pizza delivery cyclists on their nightly schedule, some eye-opening stats about how many tomatoes we produce and a thrilling flyover of California’s central valley – farmland so big and productive that it alone produces a quarter of the food consumed in the United States.

I’ve had to stop myself from using the word fascinating too many times. If you’re really into these things as well, watch the first part here and then click into PBS to salivate over the rest:

http://www-tc.pbs.org/s3/pbs.videoportal-prod.cdn/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf

Watch Food Machine on PBS. See more from America Revealed.