From the Fields

An interview with Steven Foster [Query Ready]

Manuscript Status: Query Ready

Word Count: 80,000

Genre: Literary Fiction

Introduction

Welcome to The Undiscovered! Thank you for being here.

On The Undiscovered I find unpublished authors with drafted manuscripts—and a boat-load of passion—to interview right here on Substack. In these discussions, I ask detailed questions in the style of a post-publication interview to give authors a place to showcase their work, channel their excitement, and connect to potential fans and publishing professionals!

If you’d like to read an in-depth note regarding the purpose and mission of this newsletter, you can read about it in the About page of this website: About The Undiscovered.

If you think you might like to be interviewed, you can find more information in the Interview Criteria tab on the home page.

With that said, let’s get to the fun part!

Author Bio

Steven D. Foster spent decades working inside the American food industry — from retail produce through packing houses, warehouses, and growing regions across the United States and multiple countries. He walked the fields, rode with the drivers, and spent time with the workers and their families. He was there for Christmas. He watched children work rows their parents had worked before them. He watched families follow the harvest north and south and north again, living in camps with no addresses.

From the Fields is the story he could not tell any other way.

Foster is founder of The Foster Food System (and active consultant), Vice President of Food Safety & Quality at Wholesale Produce Supply, LLC, and creator of a global framework for aligning food safety, traceability, sustainability, public health, and ethics across policy and industry. He was twice appointed and elected Chairman of the Minnesota Governor-Appointed Food Safety & Defense Task Force, serves on the Food Safety Council of the International Fresh Produce Association, and is a Research Reviewer for the Center for Produce Safety. He has been invited to provide presentations and speak at conferences globally. From the Fields is his debut novel.

Book Blurb

Elena left Guatemala when the corn failed and the math was devastating. She entered the American harvest circuit and never found her way back. Ten years later her daughter Luz — picking tomatoes since she was nine — is fourteen and writing everything down.

Florida in winter. Georgia in spring. Michigan in summer. Then south again. The circuit never changes. The exemptions never change. The math never changes.

Based on documented true events, From the Fields is a story about ordinary, legal, structural cruelty — and a family that refuses to disappear.

The Interview

Evelyn: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re writing from, and what you write?

Steven: My name is Steven Foster. I have spent my career inside the American food industry — walking into facilities, riding with drivers, being in growing regions across the United States, Central America, and parts of Europe. I have been in virtually every capacity this industry has to offer. I am the founder of The Foster Food System, a framework that connects food safety, traceability, sustainability, ethics, and public health — because in reality, none of these exist in isolation. They support one another, and they have to be considered together.

Evelyn: I love that you said it “demanded to be told.” I think that’s a really important distinction. Anybody can say they want to write a story — but does it demand to be told? Can you tell us more about the story itself?

Steven: It is told through the eyes of a young woman named Luz. She is fourteen years old. I changed the names to protect the people the story is based on, but this is all rooted in documented reality.

Evelyn: Can you tell us more about Luz specifically? What does she want?

Steven: She is documenting so that people will see what is happening. The people who harvest our food are created to be invisible — and they are well-taught to accept that invisibility. Through her notebook, Luz is refusing to disappear. She wants everything recorded so that at some point, someone will see it.

Evelyn: If you had to describe the emotional core of the book in three words, what would they be?

Steven: Human dignity. Defiance. Hope — even when hope is very small and very expensive.

Evelyn: Can you explain a little about that legal framework — the visa piece — for readers who may not be familiar with it?

Steven: Without giving the story away entirely — these workers are recruited in their home countries, sometimes by recruiters connected to organized networks. The dream is sold to them. They pay fees, sometimes thousands of dollars, to get here legally. Once they arrive, their documents are confiscated for what is called safekeeping. Now they are nobody. They do not exist without documentation. They cannot leave. The debt is real and it follows them across borders.

Evelyn: Who do you think this book is for? Who is your reader?

Steven: I think it crosses a lot of boundaries. It is for someone who wants to understand a reality that exists inside the country they live in — happening right now, in the fields that produce the food on their table. It is for someone who cares about human dignity and wants to feel, not just read about, what that means for the people being discussed in policy rooms.

Evelyn: Where can people follow you or this project?

Steven: Right now, LinkedIn is my primary presence — I post there twice a week on topics related to food safety, ethics, and sustainability. A website is forthcoming. The story is also something I see as a limited series or a feature film with an original soundtrack. I am actively looking for the right partners to bring it to life in that way.

Evelyn: Can you talk about the copyright process — since you mentioned you had it copyrighted?

Steven: It was important to me to protect the work, and it turned out to be more straightforward than I expected. You go to the US Copyright Office online, fill out a questionnaire, upload the document, and pay the fee. You receive a registration number. The more nuanced challenge is protecting the integrity of the story — making sure that someone cannot take something similar and put it out first. That part requires more vigilance. But the registration itself was not difficult.

Evelyn: What was your writing process like?

Steven: Late nights. That is when I have the clearest mind — when the rest of the day has gone quiet. I do not sleep a lot, and this is part of what I do with that time.

Evelyn: What was the hardest scene for you to write?

Steven: There are a few. There are people locked in trailers. There are mothers who left their children at home thinking they would be back in a season or two, and returned when the child was ten or fifteen years old — missing everything in between. There are people who died from heat stroke because the legal protections on paper were not the reality in the field.

Evelyn: Did you ever lose confidence in the project?

Steven: No. Not once. The story kept pushing. Some things are not something you choose — they choose you. This was one of them.

Evelyn: Are you still editing, or do you feel it is complete?

Steven: I feel it is complete. I have gone back through it many times — reading, rewriting, shaping. At some point you have to let it be what it is. I am also beginning something new that extends from this world — a companion story of sorts. But From the Fields is done. It is ready.

Evelyn: What has writing this book taught you about storytelling?

Steven: That the reader has to feel like they are inside it. Not observing — inside. I want someone to pick this up and find themselves in that truck with Luz, watching Florida come up flat and green on the horizon, and feel what she feels before she even opens her notebook. The goal was never to inform. The goal was to make someone feel something they could not unfeel.

An Excerpt from From the Fields

by Steven Foster

The truck smelled like engine oil and the last four hundred miles.

The bench seat was cracked along Carlos’s side, the foam yellowed through the split. A McDonald’s cup from Georgia rolled under Luz’s feet every time her father braked. She had been meaning to pick it up since South Carolina.

Luz pressed her face to the window and watched Florida come up slow — flat and green and enormous, the sky sitting right on top of it like a lid. She’d seen it before. Every year she saw it. But it still surprised her, how much sky there was, how it swallowed everything underneath it.

Her father drove without speaking. He’d been driving since three in the morning, since they pulled out of her cousin’s parking lot in Georgia in the dark. Both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, the look on his face that Luz knew meant he was doing math. Miles to the camp. Days until the season started. How much they’d need to make and how fast.

Her mother sat beside him with her hands folded in her lap, looking at the road but not seeing it. She was somewhere else — somewhere between here and Guatemala, between the daughter she’d left behind ten years ago and the daughter sitting behind her. Luz watched the back of her mother’s head and felt the distance in it.

Carlos was asleep against the window. Or pretending to be. He did that on long drives — closed his eyes so he didn’t have to look at the fields coming up on both sides of the highway. The irrigation lines. The migrant camps set back from the road with rows of identical trailers. Luz understood. Seeing it from the highway was different from being inside it. From the highway you could almost pretend it wasn’t yours.

This was the same loop they had followed for years. Florida in the winter for tomatoes. Georgia and the Carolinas in the spring — peppers, then whatever the grower needed picked before the heat made it impossible. Michigan in the summer for blueberries, the fields cold in the early mornings, a different cold from Florida, a cold with weight to it. Then south again as the season turned, back down through Georgia, back to Florida, back to the camp at the end of the dirt road.

The family had worked this circuit so many times the roads between the states felt like hallways in a house they’d never chosen to live in. They knew which rest stops had clean bathrooms. They knew which stretches of I-75 had the worst truck traffic at three in the morning. They knew how many hours from the Georgia state line to the Immokalee exit and how many buckets it would take in the first week to cover what the drive had cost them.

This was tomato season. This was Florida. This was the camp at the end of the dirt road with the sign missing and the key on the yellow plastic tag. Same as last year. Same as always.

In the back, Abuela was actually asleep. Mouth slightly open. Hands crossed on her chest. Seventy-four years old. She had made this drive more times than anyone in the truck. She slept through it the way old people sleep through things that used to terrify them — with a peace that wasn’t peace at all, but memory.

The camp was called Palmetto Gardens, a name somebody had given it a long time ago that nobody used anymore. Workers called it the Camp. The crew boss called it the property. The sign at the entrance had been missing for years — just two metal posts in the ground at the end of a dirt road, and if you didn’t know what you were looking for you’d drive right past.

Luz knew what she was looking for.

Twenty trailers in two rows facing each other across a strip of packed dirt. Some had plastic chairs outside, a few had small gardens — tomato plants, herbs, things women had started and then left behind when the season ended and they followed the harvest north. A water spigot near the middle with a plastic bag tied around its base, the kind you see when a leak has been someone’s problem for a while. A concrete block building at the far end with bathrooms and a washer that worked sometimes.

Rolando was standing outside the office. Wide, not tall, clipboard, belt buckle the size of a fist. Same green cap every day, brim bent down so you couldn’t see his eyes. Luz had known him since she was nine. She had never been able to tell the color of his eyes.

Her father got out. They shook hands the way men do when they don’t like each other but need each other. Rolando wrote something on his clipboard without looking down — the pen scratching, his eyes on her father’s face the whole time. Luz had never seen him run out of paper. Rolando pointed to a trailer near the end of the second row and handed over a key on a yellow plastic tag.

Same pay as last year, her father said. Not a question.

Rolando said something about the season starting Wednesday, about hours, about conduct. He used the word conduct with a particular weight — the weight of a word that means something specific that you are not going to explain because explaining would cost you something.

Her father nodded. Carlos leaned against the truck with his arms crossed, looking at a point somewhere over Rolando’s shoulder. Rolando glanced at Carlos. One second. He wrote on his clipboard and walked away.

The trailer: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen the size of a hallway. Everything the same shade of beige. A ceiling fan with one blade that wobbled. A window above the sink looking out on the dirt between the rows.

Her mother opened all the windows first thing. Then she wiped down the counters with the cloth she kept in her purse for exactly this purpose. The burner on the left took three tries to light — the flame came up orange, then blue, then orange again before it settled. Her mother said nothing. She did not mention the grease on the stovetop or the watermark on the ceiling or the mold along the bathroom tiles. She just cleaned. That was how she arrived somewhere — not by looking at what it was, but by making it hers.

Carlos dropped the bags on the floor. He stood in the doorway of the second bedroom looking at the two twin mattresses, the bare walls.

He said: Another year.

Luz said: We just got here.

He looked at her with something quieter than anger and harder to argue with.

He said: I know.

He went outside. Screen door opened. Closed. His footsteps on the dirt. Then nothing.

That night Abuela made soup. A bone, onion, cilantro, a dried chile wrapped in newspaper since Georgia. The trailer filled with the smell of it and Luz sat at the table just breathing, because it smelled like home — or the closest thing to home that moved around with them.

Her father said: Season starts Wednesday. Good growing season. Six, seven weeks of solid picking if the weather holds.

Carlos ate and said nothing. Eyes on his bowl.

Her father said his name. Carlos looked up.

Good money if we work clean, her father said. No trouble this year.

Carlos said: When have I ever made trouble?

Nobody answered. Abuela ladled more soup into Luz’s bowl without asking. The ceiling fan wobbled overhead. Outside, somebody in another trailer had a radio on — brass and rhythm, something you could almost dance to if you were somewhere else.

Later, when the others were asleep, Luz opened her notebook at the kitchen table.

We are back. The trailer smells like the last family and every family before them — cooking and sleeping and trying in a small space.

I am fourteen. This is my fifth season. There are kids here younger than me. Nobody says anything about it. I didn’t used to think about it. I think about it now.

Carlos is sitting on the steps outside. He’s been there an hour. He’s not looking at anything. I think that’s the point.

My brother looks at this place like it already owes him something. Maybe it does.

Abuela says the first night is always the hardest. You have left one place and not yet become the other. The in-between.

Interview Experience

Speaking with Evelyn was a genuinely comfortable and enjoyable experience. The conversation felt natural and relaxed — she created a space where I could speak openly about the book and what it means to me. I appreciated her thoughtful preparation and the care she brought to the process. I would recommend The Undiscovered to any author looking for a warm, professional platform to share their work.

Conclusion

This short, yet sweet interview with Steven Foster is such a fascinating look into the food industry as well as immigration law in the USA. If you’re interested in this book or want to know more about the work Steven does, you can follow him on LinkedIn: Steven Foster LinkedIn where he posts multiple times a week!

Thanks for venturing through the Undiscovered with me! See you next week!