In a world where capitalist industry has consumed most of the world's raw materials, the economy has shrunken and many services have gone extinct. Most people rely on NutriBloc, an unappetizing green, globby paste manufactured by Davies Inc., for their diet, with the occasional helping of canned chicken and bitter potatoes. Evelyn Troyer grew up on the east side of Hampton, a large city near the Pacific coast in northern California. One day, she applies for a job at a hydroponics greenhouse farm, in the hopes that she can bring some joy back to people by giving them access to a higher variety of crops. However, this job is not without its challenges: First, it's located in Cedar Valley, a suburb of Hampton that she has never been to, and she knows no one here. Second, she quickly realizes that this hydroponics farm is not the panacea to her community's problems like she once naively thought. Over the course of the book, she meets the people in Cedar Valley and, through a combination of her experiences with other people and through her own efforts at self-reflection on those experiences, she unlearns some deep-seated beliefs she had learned when growing up.