They were still at the same long-established steak and burger place, the Skyline Restaurant.
Outside, dawn was just breaking. Nick sat across from the brothers, Dean and Sam, each of them wolfing down the food on his plate.
Nick finished fastest. After polishing off two steaks and a pile of fries, he leaned back comfortably and happily sipped his Coke.
He had always been a carnivore. Although he usually cooked for himself and had little interest in so-called fine dining, he occasionally indulged himself with some everyday American fare at a steak restaurant like this.
This affordable restaurant, which had been in business since the forties or fifties, had always used good ingredients. Its beef was genuine beef supplied by farms on the nearby outskirts, though whether they would still be able to get beef like this in the future was hard to say.
Land consolidation was a serious problem in America these days. Small farmers with one or two hundred acres of ancestral land (200 acres = 80 hectares), who would already count as "major landowners" in the eyes of people from Cyrus, struggled terribly to make a living.
With seeds, fertilizer, livestock vaccines, agricultural sales channels, and so on all controlled by corporate conglomerates, these farms could not even bring in more than $50,000 in annual sales.
More and more small farmers, once their cash flow collapsed, were forced to choose between "bankruptcy"-having their land auctioned off-and voluntarily selling or leasing their land.
As someone from Cyrus who wanted a piece of land of his own and had once yearned for a supposedly idyllic rural life, Nick had recognized this early on. If he wanted to become a "landowner" in this country, he first had to become a proper capitalist.
"So, what you were trying to tell us