Still, perhaps it's time to measure just how that quest is going.
If the book does not quite live up to the ambitions of its subtitle ("How the Quest for Food Shaped America"), it is still a lively and informative read.
As a Yankees fan, he must know how that quest began for Rodriguez -- five seasons struggling to fit in, succeeding in the regular season but faltering in the playoffs, no matter how many superstars surrounded him.
Throughout college, I had been reading and following the work of Courtney E. Martin, author of "Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists" and "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection Is Harming Young Women".
But his dismissal reflects how the quest for representation in minority communities can devolve into cliquishness; those who don't belong, or don't look as if they belong, are left feeling irrelevant to the cause.
On the question of accuracy versus utility, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges relates how the quest for accuracy leads the cartographers of an ancient land to make a map exactly the same size as their empire.
Ukraine has recently experienced fuel shortages, which its prime minister blamed on over-reliance on Russian oil.A little further afield, two other proposed pipelines demonstrate how the quest for energy resources can overcome some political difficulties while creating others.
They failed to mention how their quest to leave no technology un-surveillable puts the security of everyone's devices at risk – or how the law doesn't allow them to do what they are attempting.
"Putting the label 'organic' or 'local' on a product allows a vendor to charge more, irregardless of supply and demand," said James E. McWilliams, the author of "A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America".
According to Pedro Domingos (author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World) the ultimate algorithm is one where machine learning can derive all knowledge from data.
