2007 U.S. farm bill: the root of many evils? at What’s Organic

…from land stewardship and immigration to obesity and school lunches, in this week’s New York Times Magazine Michael Pollan outlines how U.S. Farm Bill subsidies for corn, soy and wheat have far-reaching and disturbing implications.

Reading Pollan’s You Are What You Grow was one more weird wake-up call. In the article Pollan compares a bunch of carrots with a Twinkie, and explains why the Twinkie — with it’s 39 ingredients — is still cheaper (calorie for calorie) than our favorite ubiquitous orange root vegetable.

Also a wake up call because the farm bill includes reauthorization for both the national school lunch and food stamp programs. Pollan comments that “the farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce.”

Pollan is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He moderated a webcast panel discussion of the 2007 farm bill (download requires RealPlayer) on March 21 with guests Dan Imhoff, the author of Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill and other leaders in the effort to reform federal agricultural policies. His most recent book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

“A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what its surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross-purposes with its public-health objectives.”

More excerpts from You Are What You Grow, followed by more reading and what you can do (or read entire article here):

“It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles. But the guiding principle behind an eater’s farm bill could not be more straightforward: it’s one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”

“This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root.”

“To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States.”

What you can do: send email to your Representatives:

More reading: