The Food Disruptors, Episode 2 finds Ruddick and Theresa hovering in their virtual TARDIS over the Delaware Valley, circa 1790. Colonial engineering nerd, Oliver Evans, gets a break -- capital backing to build a commercial grist mill based on his revolutionary design. And so he does, and it works great! But the entrenched competitors pooh-pooh his unfamiliar approach of continuous automated processing, which at once disheartens and embitters our prototypical innovator.

The Food Disruptors Episode 2 shows how little has really changed in food capitalism -- from ignorant dismissal of new designs by the entrenched protectors of the status quo to endless patent lawsuits. The Delaware Valley of 200 years ago was the Silicon Valley of today dressed up in colonial costumes (and minus a bit of infrastructure, much of which ironically we can trace back to Oliver Evans' innovations in continuous industrial processing.)