Oil and food don't mix

Congress just handed petroleum- and chemical-guzzling industrial farms five more years of wrongheaded subsidies, but chef Dan Barber says sustainable, organic food will yet prevail.

By Eli Rosenberg

Read more: Health, Nutrition, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Aug. 23, 2007 | It's deceptive to say that you are what you eat. If you were, you would likely be heavily processed, refined and packaged, rich in high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats. Or even worse: caged for the majority of your life and fed strictly grain until you were slaughtered unceremoniously.

Be ecstatic that you aren't what you eat.

With each passing year, the food piled on our nation's plates travels greater distances from the field to the table and is increasingly cultivated under factory-farm conditions. But for all we now know about the unseemly origins of much of what we ingest, we are still a little foggy on what has made the U.S. food supply what it is today: an expansive piece of legislation called the farm bill.

Voted on by Congress every five years, the farm bill has dramatically changed the American way of eating in just the past half-century. Its corn subsidies have given way to the tidal wave of high-fructose corn syrup that fuels the nation's obesity epidemic, its corporate-friendly policies led to the growth of major agribusiness and the death of family farms -- and it continues to affect quality-of-life issues ranging from food stamps to school nutrition programs to clean-water, -air and -energy initiatives.

Thanks to attention in the press and the high-profile success of writers like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle, this might well have been a year of substantial reform in farming legislation; even the Bush administration and the Department of Agriculture were ironically joined with organic- and sustainable-farming advocates in a push for major change. But the version of the farm bill passed by the House of Representatives this August was just business as usual. (The Senate has not yet taken up the bill; it has to be finalized by the end of September, when the 2002 bill expires.) Farmers making up to a million dollars were still made eligible for government aid, only $2.4 billion (over five years) was allotted to clean-energy research (well short of the USDA's proposed $5 billion), and farm subsidies were still structured to heavily favor refined goods over fresh and local produce.

To help take stock of what happened, Salon contacted Dan Barber, the chef and co-owner of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York and a longtime advocate of sustainable farming, who weighed in on the farm bill and its far-reaching effects in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year. We spoke about politics, agriculture's effect on our everyday lives and why it's simply fun to eat.

Let's start with the farm bill. What do you think of the version that just passed the House?

I'm not surprised by it. Everyone knew when the Democrats came in that the seats they won in the House were precarious -- and a lot of them are in districts that rely on farm subsidies. The problem is the political landscape. Until recently, few people considered this farm bill a food bill. But if people in metro regions can understand that the farm bill directly affects how they eat, then politicians will stop trading votes. If you look back on the last five bills, up and down the line you see urban congressional representatives trading votes with rural Midwestern congressional representatives, because they don't think their constituencies in the blue states and metro regions care about this bill. So they trade votes for gun control laws, or transportation issues.

But this was supposed to be the year of reform -- the agricultural economy is good, food politics have been getting more press than they ever, and obesity is increasingly regarded as a deep-rooted epidemic. What happened?

You have to understand that even Michael Pollan's book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," was written and published at a time when a lot of what was included in this year's farm bill had already taken place. This stuff happens over many years. What it shows is that the farm bill in general has just been this ignored, incredibly important omnibus piece of legislation, which just in the last few years has gotten more notice. But that notice has already had a profound impact.

Do you seen any positives in this year's bill?

There's some stuff about organic agriculture, research and money for environmental stewardship that wasn't there before, and that's very positive. But the main question now is which of those positive elements will end up getting appropriated. Because the last farm bill also contained some good stuff, like the conservation security program. But a year later, when everyone had turned their heads away from the bill, that's when the money got voted on. And in the case of the conservation security program, $4 billion -- 50 percent of its funding -- got cut.

Federal farm subsidies were originally designed during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression for farmers in need, but under the current bill, a farmer who earns up to a million dollars is still eligible for government payments. That seems insane.

It's just illustrative of a system gone amok -- there are dead farmers getting payments! But honestly, while the issue gets press because it's so emblematic of the bill's problems, in the scheme of things, those subsidies represent a tiny amount of money. We're missing the point when we start concentrating on that stuff because it's just politics.

At the same time, a lot of the important reforms we're asking for -- for organic research, environmental causes or school lunches -- are also mind-numbingly small. What is $30 million a year in the scope of an $80 billion bill? Yet still, when anyone tries to get those reforms pushed through, the lobbying that goes on to kill them is intense!

What has happened to the small family farm?

One way to look at it is that after World War II the U.S. absorbed a huge influx of GIs at the same time that there was a supercharged economy and a boom in technology that encouraged monoculture. Before the war you couldn't grow 500 acres of corn or 30 acres of broccoli. You would have been asking for economic collapse because you would have been vulnerable to things like weather and climate. But after the war farmers were able to get specialized because of new pesticides and fertilizers.

So pesticides were a result of the war?

A lot of the factories that made machinery for World War II ending up making chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It is actually the same raw materials, chemically speaking, that are invested in war machinery and ammunition that go into chemical fertilizers. You could be both very productive and very profitable with the use of chemicals, and that changed the game.

Was there a pivotal moment in government policy that paved the way for the rise of refined and fast foods?

Everything really changed in the early 1970s with Earl "Rusty" Butz, the secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon who changed the rules of the subsidies program. We stopped paying farmers loans and we just paid them direct payments, based on how much they produced. That changed everything.

Fence row to fence row planting was Butz's other famous thing. All of a sudden everyone was given incentives to get bigger. He was an organizational guy, an Army lieutenant, and his calling card was productivity. Fence row to fence row just encouraged everyone to rip up their natural ecology of grass and mixed farms, of animals and agriculture, and just plant corn, because you were going to be assured to get paid at a good price.

Next page: "Who pays when we have an obese nation?"