Why I Wrote Dark Recipe: Food, Code, and the Fragility We Don’t Want to See

On December 20, 2025, I published Dark Recipe, a thriller about food, technology, and the systems that quietly hold modern life together—until they don’t.

On the surface, it’s a story about a weaponized indoor farming platform, a biotoxin no one is looking for, and an engineer, Knox Ramsey, who builds a system to feed people and ends up watching that same system turned against the world. Underneath the plot, though, is something more personal: my unease with how blindly we trust the infrastructure behind our food, and how casually we outsource that trust to software.

In the book, there’s a line I coined and kept coming back to as I wrote:

Trust physics, not software.

That sentence is the backbone of Dark Recipe, and it grew directly out of my own experience building agricultural automation systems, overseeing food safety, and studying how food catastrophes have unfolded in the past.

A Lesson from History: The Great Chinese Famine

One of the earliest seeds for Dark Recipe was planted when I began reading about the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961.

Tens of millions of people died, not solely because there was no food, but because a political system refused to see reality. Local officials inflated grain yields to look good. False numbers rolled up the chain, and policies based on those lies stripped food out of the countryside. On paper, the harvests were great. In the villages, people starved.

What struck me wasn’t just the scale of suffering, but the mechanism: bad data, believed by powerful people, amplified by a rigid system.

It was a man‑made disaster, built on false confidence in a model of the world that no longer matched reality.

Fast‑forward to today. China is now the world’s largest importer of food and is haunted by the memory of famine, yet it is still structurally vulnerable to disruptions. Meanwhile, in the U.S. and much of the developed world, we’ve grown almost numb about food. If it has a label, a QR code, a “certified” seal, we assume it has passed through a gauntlet of testing and is therefore safe.

That tension—between historical trauma over food insecurity and modern complacency about food safety—was one of the sparks behind Dark Recipe. In the book’s geopolitical backdrop, China quietly exploits vulnerabilities in the American food system as part of its long game toward food independence. But the real target, for me, was not a particular country. It was our shared, dangerous comfort with the idea that “someone else is watching this, so I don’t have to.”

REAP and Agrolytics: When Fiction Starts as a Real System

Before Knox Ramsey ever walked onto the page, I founded a startup called Agrolytics.

At Agrolytics, I designed and built an indoor farming system called REAP:
Recipe‑based Ecosystem for Agricultural Processes.

REAP was meant to be a flexible, highly automated platform for controlled‑environment agriculture—vertical farms, indoor cannabis, greenhouses. The vision was ambitious but straightforward:

• Industrial PLC backbone
  Use rugged, industrial‑grade PLCs (programmable logic controllers) as the core control layer. These are the workhorses of factories and process plants, designed to run reliably for decades.

• Massive sensor network
  Deploy dense arrays of sensors—temperature, humidity, CO₂, light, pH, EC, flow, pressure, imaging systems for plant health, and more—across the entire grow environment.

• Cloud‑based data lake
  Stream all of that data to a cloud‑hosted data lake. Store everything: every setpoint, every reading, every alarm, every image.

• ML/AI “recipes” for growth
  Use machine learning and AI to analyze that ocean of data and continuously refine “recipes” for plant growth: heat, light, nutrient feedstocks, photoperiods, irrigation timing, airflow, imaging feedback, efficient use of water, and resource optimization.

In short: grow anything, anywhere, anytime of the year, by closing the loop between physics (what’s happening in the environment), biology (how the plants respond), and software (how we adjust the controls).

If you’ve read Dark Recipe, you’ll recognize this architecture. That’s by design. The system at the heart of the novel isn’t a sci‑fi fantasy—it’s a thinly veiled version of what we were actually building.

When you’ve spent years designing these systems, you eventually ask yourself a different question:
What happens if someone points all this power the wrong way?

Molly’s Grape & Citrus: Food Safety in the Real World

Today, I serve as the CTO and COO of Molly’s Grape & Citrus Company. Among other responsibilities, I have oversight of food safety, including compliance with FSMA Rule 204 and the Food Traceability List requirements.

That means I spend a lot of time thinking about:

• Where every lot of product came from
• How it moved through the supply chain
• What records exist (or don’t) at each handoff
• How fast we can trace, respond, and recall if something goes wrong

From the outside, that can sound dry. On the inside, you realize how much of modern life depends on these invisible processes working correctly—and how often they’re held together by a mix of good intentions, aging infrastructure, and software we barely understand anymore.

When you combine that reality with the optimism of the indoor farming world—“data‑driven,” “automated,” “secure”—you get a dangerous kind of comfort. We have sensors. We have logs. We have dashboards. Therefore, we must have control.

That assumption is what Dark Recipe attacks.

Our Blind Faith in Labels and Code

Most of us, most of the time, don’t think about where our food came from. We see a sticker, a brand name, a batch code, maybe a marketing claim about sustainability or testing, and we move on.

If it’s labeled, if a system tracked it, we assume it must be safe.

In Dark Recipe, I wanted to push hard against that blind faith. Not as an alarmist or someone preaching from a soapbox, but as someone who has actually sat in the control rooms, written the logic, and watched these systems run.

The biotoxins in the book are not exotic military agents. They are produced by the plants themselves—defense chemicals and stress responses nudged into dangerous territory by a manipulated growing environment. The twist is that these compounds:

• Are not part of routine testing panels
• Are not easily visible in a warehouse or a loading dock
• Can slip through systems that have been optimized for efficiency, yield, and standard hazards—but not for something that “shouldn’t be there” in the first place

In other words, the threat comes from within the biology, triggered by subtle changes in physics and chemistry that the software either misses, misinterprets, or actively hides.

Which brings me back to that line:

Trust physics, not software.

Software can lie. Databases can be corrupted. Dashboards can show you green lights while the real world is burning. Physics doesn’t care. If the plant is stressed, if the chemistry is off, if the environment is wrong, reality will eventually show up—often in the emergency room.

Systems, Squabbles, and the Human Factor

The rest of the story in Dark Recipe is built around very human failures that sit on top of these technical systems:

• Interdepartmental squabbling
  Agencies and organizations that should cooperate instead protect their turf. Data is siloed. Warnings are ignored. No one wants to be the first to say, “We don’t know what this is.”

• Unprepared trauma centers
  Level I and II trauma centers are incredibly capable at handling car crashes, shootings, and familiar mass casualty patterns. But a distributed, chemically mediated event that looks like “food poisoning” at first? That stretches protocols and overwhelms capacity in ways we don’t like to imagine.

• A family story at the core
  Knox Ramsey is not a villain. He’s an engineer who built a system to help people. Like Oppenheimer, he lives with the knowledge that his creation has been twisted into something he never intended. That moral weight—“I built this, and now people are dying because of it”—is as central to the book as any geopolitical maneuver.

I didn’t write Dark Recipe to lecture anyone about what they should eat or how they should live. I wrote it to make readers a little less complacent about the systems we all depend on, and a little more skeptical of the idea that software will save us from ourselves.

If the book leaves you with one lingering thought, I hope it’s this:

When it comes to food, safety, and the infrastructure that keeps us alive, don’t just trust the label or the screen.

Trust physics, not software.

There’s a moment in every career when you realize the job title on your business card doesn’t actually describe who you are. For me, that moment came somewhere between leaving Dow Chemical, getting laid off during COVID, starting two companies, co-founding a produce company, and deciding — apparently without consulting my better judgment — to write novels.

For thirty years, I was an automation guy. That was the identity. Walk into a plant, look at a broken system, figure out what’s wrong, fix it, move on. I had two patents, a career I was proud of, and a very specific lane I drove in. If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be formatting manuscripts in Vellum, obsessing over cover designs, and preparing for a live television interview about a techno-thriller I wrote, I would’ve asked what you were drinking and whether you’d share.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand, and it took me longer than it should have. The skills that made me effective in automation — pattern recognition, systems thinking, troubleshooting under pressure, translating complex information into something a technician on the floor at 2 a.m. can actually use — those aren’t automation skills. They’re thinking skills. They’re communication skills. They’re problem-solving skills wearing a hard hat and steel-toed boots.

We do this thing as a society where we define people by their vocation. You’re a plumber. You’re a nurse. You’re an engineer. And we start to believe it ourselves. I know I did. But your vocation is really just a set of tools you’ve been trained to use in a specific context. The underlying abilities — the capacity to learn, adapt, analyze, and create — those travel with you no matter where you go.

When I started writing Dark Recipe, I didn’t sit down and think, “I’m going to use my automation background to write a thriller.” But that’s exactly what happened. The way I structure a narrative isn’t all that different from how I’d approach a system integration project. You identify the inputs, you map the process, you anticipate where things can fail, and you build in redundancy. Characters are like field devices — they each serve a function, and if one goes offline, the whole system feels it.

The same thing happened when I started building companion websites for my books. I wasn’t learning a new skill from scratch. I was repurposing decades of technical documentation experience into a different medium. The content changed, but the discipline didn’t.

I think about the people I’ve worked with over the years — electricians, mechanics, tool and die makers, process engineers — and I wonder how many of them are sitting on a second act they haven’t considered because they’ve boxed themselves into a single identity. You’re not your job title. You never were. You’re the sum of every problem you’ve solved, every system you’ve understood, every time you figured something out that nobody else could. That doesn’t expire when you change industries.

So if you’re reading this and you’ve been thinking about doing something outside your lane — writing, teaching, starting a business, learning to weld, whatever it is — stop asking yourself if you’re qualified. Ask yourself if you’re willing. The skills will transfer. They always do.

You just have to be stubborn enough to let them.

Signed, The Ringmaster

The Books on My Shelf (and in My Ears)

Something peculiar I’ve noticed about myself: I listen to an awful lot of audiobooks, and often I’ll buy hardcover copies of the ones I really want to keep—the ones that are special to me. I also shop at new and used bookstores. I’m a big supporter of small businesses, especially bookstores and record shops. I think they’re culturally significant in ways we don’t always appreciate. There’s nothing like walking into a place with creaky floors where you meet the owner or someone who just likes working there for the love of curating works of art.

I’m writing this post to share which authors have influenced me—either in my life generally or specifically in my writing. Some I simply enjoyed reading. Others shaped how I think about storytelling.

History Through My Family’s Eyes

I tend to read a mix of pop culture, biography, and history books, generally from timelines my family lived through. Growing up in the 1980s meant the Reagan and Bush 41 era, then Clinton, then W. But I’ve also spent a lot of time with books about Vietnam because of my father and two of his brothers who served. I’ve read some about the forgotten war—Korea—and quite a bit about World War II. Then there’s a gap before I circle back to the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and now I’m reading about the pre-Revolution era as I trace my genealogy and learn when ancestral lines immigrated to what would eventually become the United States.

There’s also a personal dimension to some of this reading. I’ve read a fair amount about our three-letter agencies, especially after discovering that my maternal grandfather appears to have been involved with early Marine Corps OSS operations during World War II. On my father’s side, my paternal grandfather—also a Marine—served on Guadalcanal and kept a secret diary. One of my uncles transcribed it and shared it with the family. He revealed nothing classified (he wasn’t exposed to anything classified to begin with), but his notes are a treasure to us.

The Historians Who Taught Me to Write

Outside of family history, I have a deep love for the work of David McCullough, and more recently, I’ve been getting into Ron Chernow. I like them both for different reasons.

McCullough taught me that history doesn’t have to be boring. The rich color and texture he brings to a time period and its people make you feel like you’re right there. Reading about Paul Revere’s midnight ride, I felt like I could have been on horseback alongside him, feeling the tension, not knowing what was around the corner—whether he’d live or die.

Chernow writes like he’s composing a doctoral thesis. I have to focus and concentrate, and I know I’m in for a long haul. But because of him, when I read about Ulysses S. Grant, I learned things I never would have known otherwise—what a hero he was, and also how trusting and foolish he could be with people and money. I’m currently reading Titan, his biography of John D. Rockefeller. It’s about 900 pages.

I also just acquired McCullough’s The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. I haven’t started it yet, but I’m excited. It’s not just about how they built a bridge—I want to know how they convinced people to construct such an engineering marvel at that time in history. And selfishly, I want to learn how to write better. How do you take intricate, detailed stories full of politics and engineering and make them palatable—even enjoyable—for readers? That’s what I’m studying.

True Crime and the Behavioral Mind

I’ve read a fair amount of psychological nonfiction, particularly related to the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. That world has always fascinated me—John Douglas and Mindhunter especially. Some of that reading has influenced the fiction I’m working on that’s truth-based in that area.

Fiction That Shaped Me

Let me talk about C.J. Box for a moment. I was introduced to him backwards, the way many of us experience authors these days—I watched the television show Joe Pickett first, then picked up a book. Then I found out one of my old sandbox buddies from my days on Wilman Drive has read the entire catalog, so I started working through them. They’re incredible. Joe Pickett is essentially a game warden in Wyoming. He has a family. How could that be exciting? But it really is. Box turned a seemingly ordinary character into a deep, humble, everyday hero stopping crime from a variety of antagonists.

I also like Michael Connelly. I’ve read his entire catalog—dare I say his corpus. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of it, though there are a few I didn’t care for. But what a wonderful crime series set in Los Angeles.

John Grisham I enjoy tremendously. I haven’t read all of his work, but I’ve read quite a bit.

Dan Brown fascinates me. For those who don’t know him by name, they probably know him from Angels & Demons, which became a hit movie with Tom Hanks. He’s written several books since, including The Da Vinci Code and his latest, which I’m also reading.

Permission to Build a Foundation

Of the fiction writers I mentioned, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and Jack Carr taught me something important: it’s OK to have exposition as long as it moves the story forward. That includes a prologue and an epilogue.

The prologue comes into play for me because I don’t like cartoon villains—at least not in bigger stories. There’s always more than one side. There’s the truth, there’s the other truth, and then there’s the truth somewhere in the middle. Each of these writers took their craft and provided background, a basis, a foundation. They start with the why and the how.

When I was getting ready to publish Dark Recipe, I had to figure out how to categorize it. What genre? And I’m very self-aware that I can’t always answer a simple question with a yes or no—even though as an electrical engineer I deal in binary systems. Ones and zeros. On or off.

But those who are electrical engineers reading this (or reading my books) will tell you: a zero isn’t really zero. It’s between 0 and 2.7 volts. Then there’s a small range in the middle—an unknown state. And to be “on,” you might need 3.8 to 5 volts. You get the idea. There’s always a threshold. Even with discrete outputs, there’s always something in the middle.

That’s how I feel about genre. My books are geopolitical. They’re technical. You could argue they’re psychological in nature. When it comes time to sell, you have to make marketing decisions—pick a category, check a box. But some people might consider my work to be literary fiction. I’m writing messages in these books. I’m expressing my thoughts. I want people to think about things. I’ll get into that more in another blog post specifically about Dark Recipe, but for now, just know that the genre question isn’t as binary as it seems.

What do you do with that middle? In electrical engineering speak, you’re tri-state. Undefined. Depending on your perspective.

In writing, that middle ground lets the reader decide.

Some people have a problem with that. It’s like the ending of The Sopranos—the family’s alive, Tony’s alive, and then it fades to black. You don’t really know. Even when the writer says he intended for Tony to die… did he? You don’t know. That’s what I’m getting at. That’s why the background matters. That’s why the prologue matters.

I hope as I continue to write that I’ll learn to be as concise as I am precise. We’ll see. But those writers gave me permission—not to write endlessly, but to lay a foundation. Because the stories they write are complex. Nuanced. Many layers. More than one plot line.

For someone like me, I love that. My life has never been a straight path. Very curvilinear. From the day I was shot out of the womb, nothing has been easily laid out in front of me. I’ve had help along the way—don’t get me wrong—but if there’s a slight chance something could go not according to plan, that was me. You learn to adapt or you don’t survive. Plans and rules have largely been treated as suggestions in my life.

The Field Guide: What Didn’t Fit in the Book

My first book, Dark Recipe, was way too technical in the early drafts. So I decided to use some of the skills I have from my career in automation and custom software development. I created what I call a Field Guide at knoxramseythrillers.com.

I threw a lot of the material I couldn’t get away with in the story—or at least thought I couldn’t—into the Field Guide. The pacing was already slow in some areas, and I knew that too much exposition would lose some readers. At first, I was a little arrogant about it. I thought, “Well, if they don’t want to read it, then don’t read it.” But that’s not really my intention. I want someone to enjoy the story. I want them to go on a journey with me.

So I built the Field Guide. I use that term because it’s how an engineer or scientist would document things. It’s behind the scenes. Behind the curtain. And honestly, it became a lot of fun. Having a website I could manipulate—adding color, richness, interactive elements—was a creative outlet I didn’t expect.

If someone wants a more immersive experience after reading the book, they can visit the site. Or during the reading. There’s more background, more explanation of the science, and citations, too. I stated it in the book, but I’ll say it again here: all the science in Dark Recipe is real. It’s not science fiction. It’s fiction based on science. I think there’s a difference.

Introspection and Influence

Gregg Hurwitz was also a tremendous influence, but not in the same way as the others. His influence was about introspection.

His Evan Smoak character—Orphan X—has a lot of internal reflection. I tried to leverage that influence as much as I could. Orphan X has extensive combat training. Hand-to-hand. He’s skilled and deadly. James Reece in Jack Carr’s Terminal List series is a former Navy SEAL, also highly trained. There’s tremendous technical depth in those books, and the combat scenes are intense.

Tom Clancy, a former insurance salesman (which I love), brought tremendous technical depth and detail. He wrote about the Cold War era and the Soviet threat at the time.

And then there’s Michael Crichton—a medical doctor who became a writer. Many of his books were prescient. In my own way, I wanted to honor him and his influence in Dark Recipe. The level of precision and accuracy I tried to achieve in the trauma scenes set in Detroit emergency departments was largely because of him—and because of my family members who’ve worked in healthcare.

Beyond the Page

There are other people who’ve influenced not necessarily my writing, but my personal life.

One book I’ve been thinking about frequently is Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. It’s an incredible story of determination, perseverance, and an engine that won’t quit. He was a morbidly obese kid with a hard-scrabble upbringing who became an ultra-marathon runner. In between, he became a Navy SEAL. His story is emotional. It makes you want to be a better person. It’s about taking extreme ownership of your life. No excuses.

I’m not there yet. But I strive for it. I strive to be a better person. That drive comes from my friend group, my family, and these influential writers.

I know there will be more to say in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. But that’s it for now. You have a bird’s-eye view of the authors who’ve influenced me. I’m sure I’ve left some out—but don’t worry. I’ll make it up in another post.

Three years ago today—or rather, the evening of three years ago today—I was sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the very living room where I’m writing this now. Right now I can get up easily, use the restroom, get a drink, lay on my side, whatever I want to do. That was not the case three years ago.

I write about this experience in a memoir I wrote called Work the Problem. I had originally written it for me and me alone, but decided it was something I should publish. I’ve already spoken about the book in a video post on social media, so I won’t bore you with those details here.

What I will say is this: one of the most profound discoveries I made during that time was that when we’re in the moment, we don’t really understand the full impact of what’s happened—how it changes you, or in my case, perhaps gave me a reset.

I discovered that when you’re in the bee’s nest, you don’t pay attention to all the buzzing that goes on every day. But if you give yourself a chance to look out—or rather, look in from the outside—there’s so much happening. In three years, a tremendous amount has happened in my life, my family’s life, and my friends’ lives. I’m just paying attention a little differently now.

As much as I would like to think I can be all things to all people and do everything, I’ve found that I simply can’t. I’ve set some expectations that are reasonable and achievable, and some that are still achievable but not so reasonable.

I’ve decided to keep track of my thoughts—daily, weekly, or monthly—in the same way I would if I kept a diary, but a little different. I’ve been a technologist in some form or another for the entirety of my life, so I’ll use a digital diary of sorts in the form of this blog.

Like most diaries, some days will be heavy. Other days will be light. But what I do plan on sharing are insights on how I came up with the concept of Dark Recipe, where the name Knox Ramsey originated, why I chose that story for my first book, and why I’ve chosen to write the other stories that are coming.

I don’t plan on being too controversial in my digital diary. That being said, I may still have opinions or comments that others don’t agree with for one reason or another. You can’t please everyone.

This is also due to my observation that social media is largely a fool’s errand when discussing political issues. Today, people don’t really discuss things online—they largely pick sides or tribes. I’m generalizing, of course, but ask yourself: how many times have you actually gotten in the middle of a conversation or argument on someone’s wall—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever platform you use—and actually changed someone’s mind? If it happens, that’s a rarity. That’s a Hope Diamond.

I often write about topics in my daily life, such as modern technology and artificial intelligence on some days, and commercial produce and food safety on others. It’s amusing when I think about it—one moment I’m discussing food traceability lists (FTL) and the Food Safety Modernization Act Rule 204, also known as FSMA, and the next I’m debating the advantages and risks of artificial intelligence or figuring out the best prompts for financial calculations in my business.

Other topics I’ll share will be about my family and friends, though those will likely stay mostly on my social media sites like Facebook.

So why do I choose to use yet another digital diary interface? Why would I choose one more place to share my thoughts outside of social media?

Because I have total control over what I say on my site. We don’t have total control over what we say on the socials.

Mostly, though, I’m going to be sharing inside details about any of the stories or books I’m currently writing. I’d actually like to write a story someday about being a serial entrepreneur—what it’s been like being a co-founding member of Molly’s Grape & Citrus Company and how my role has evolved there.

There will be things I discuss that could potentially be thought of as controversial, but that’s not my intention. My intention here is simply to have an open discussion about whatever topic I want to bring up.

I consider myself to be a moderate, but I do lean strongly on certain topics. I think anyone who truly knows me would say that I am free and open to discussion about pretty much any subject. I may argue my point, but I’m open to another side. I’m open to looking at things through a different lens, to the best of my ability. It may not change my conviction, but as long as somebody has a reasonably founded argument, I’m glad to hear it. I might learn something.

I’m going to reread this to make sure I don’t have too many errors, because I do use voice-to-text quite often. This is one of the many things I’m grateful for today—having technology available that can keep up with me and my rapid speech. It helps me get my thoughts out.

I can tell you honestly, for many years of my life, not being able to write as quickly as I speak or think has stopped me from actually putting things on paper. I’m sure there’s a name for that.

With that, welcome to my blog. I know I wrote a lot, so if you made it to the bottom of this first entry, congratulations!