(FORTUNE Magazine) – AT FIRST, the assignment to explore the secretive world of food technology didn't seem so appetizing. ''I expected a kind of descent into voodoo home economics, reporting on fake food concocted by industrial alchemy,'' says associate editor Anthony Ramirez. ''But some of the things I tried were surprisingly not bad. The world's great chefs needn't feel threatened by microwave pizza or restructured beef, but both dishes were, well, surprisingly okay.'' Still, if the dishes didn't put Tony Ramirez off, their creators often did. The arcane technologies behind products like salt substitutes and pudding pops turned out to be as jealously guarded as missile blueprints. ''Everything we asked our sources seemed to be proprietary,'' he says. In interviews with more than 50 industrial researchers, academics, and security analysts, Ramirez and reporter Sarah Smith nonetheless managed to piece together a detailed look at the state of the food processor's art (page 85). Ramirez, 31, has a knack for ferreting out secrets and sorting through complexities. Before joining FORTUNE a year ago, he was San Diego business editor for the Los Angeles Times. In that post he chronicled one of Southern California's most intricate financial scandals: the collapse of J. David Dominelli's currency-trading empire. Despite his investigative skills, Ramirez was stonewalled in tracking down some of his more tantalizing leads. He was never able to verify, for example, that one company's heroically breasted turkeys can procreate only through artificial insemination. Nor could he confirm that a certain well-known snack pastry has a shelf life of 21 years. Such are the perils of charting the outer limits of any technology.

For Edmund Faltermayer, a story on the renaissance in St. Louis (page 44) was ( a chance to revisit familiar haunts. A member of the board of editors, Faltermayer began his career in St. Louis in 1949 -- selling Vicks VapoRub to drugstores on the city's south side. He quickly found his true calling, and as a journalist has returned to St. Louis many times while establishing himself as our resident expert on urban economies.