Amber Fields of Bland

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Op-Ed Contributor

Amber Fields of Bland

By DAN BARBER
Published: January 14, 2007

Tarrytown, N.Y.


THERE’S invariably something risky, if not risible, about allowing Congress to decide what’s for dinner. Bad decisions about agriculture have defined government policy for the last century; 70 percent of our nation’s farms have been lost to bankruptcy or consolidation, creating an agricultural economy that looks more Wall Street than Main Street.

Now, after the uprooting of a thousand years of agrarian wisdom, we chefs have discovered something really terrible — no, not that the agricultural system we help support hurts farmers and devastates farming communities, or that it harms the environment and our health. What we’ve discovered is that the food it produces just doesn’t taste very good.

Who’s responsible for the blandness? Look no further than Washington: There you will meet not farmers, but the people determining how our farmers farm. They do it through the farm bill, a mammoth piece of legislation that designates American agricultural policy every five years and that Congress is preparing to take up in its new session.

This is a sweeping bill, omnibus in every sense — nutrition, conservation, genetic engineering, food safety, school lunch programs, water quality, organic farming and much more. It’s really a food and farm bill. If you’re a chef or a home cook or someone who just likes to eat, it affects you, because it determines what you eat and how what you eat is grown.

And the food that we grow on 200 million acres of harvested cropland is inedible. Stand in the middle of our farm belt and you’ll see cornfields extending to the horizon, but the harvest won’t be dinner, not until it’s milled and processed into flours or starches, or used to fatten our animals on feedlots. Just four crops — corn, rice, soybeans and wheat — account for the vast majority of our harvested acreage. Not surprising, given that these same crops account for 70 percent of the total subsidies allotted to farmers.

No one wants farmers to suffer, especially chefs. But if we’re spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat. And I mean eat, not process into something that resembles food. That means fewer subsidies for grains like corn and soy, and more help for growers of broccoli and tomatoes.

How do we do this? We could start by rewarding diversity over yield, basing subsidy payments not on how many acres of corn a farmer grows but on the number of varieties of crops he plants. We could also link payments to, say, the efficiency of nitrogen fixation (crop rotation helps the soil retain nitrogen, so farmers don’t need to add it with chemicals) or equate them with how much a farm helps soil and water conservation. In effect, tie payments to plant health.
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