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<BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR> <BR><BR>January 14, 2007<BR>Op-Ed
Contributor<BR><BR><B><?bigger><?bigger><?bigger><?bigger><?bigger><?bigger>Amber
Fields of
Bland<?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger></B><BR><BR>By
<?color><?param 0000,0000,6666>DAN BARBER<?/color><BR><BR><BR>Tarrytown,
N.Y.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>This doesn’t mean the government needs to tell the farmer
what to grow. Instead, show the farmer that there’s more money to be made in
a rich, diverse ecology and the planting strategy will change. Change the
planting strategy, and whether it’s grains or greens, the quality of what’s
harvested vastly improves.<BR><BR>Yes, the naughty thumb of science may have
prodded the earth, as E. E. Cummings said, but there’s nothing wrong with
thumbing dollar bills in the direction of promoting a tastier food supply.
That’s the kind of green revolution that a chef can support.<BR><BR>But such
thoughts are rarely on the minds of our legislators, or, so it seems, anyone
else. Take as an example the insurance industry. Its policies favor big
farms that grow a single commodity crop. If you’re a farmer who wants to
grow lots of different crops, it’s almost impossible to get affordable
coverage; to insurers, you’re pretty much the equivalent of a skydiving
cigarette smoker.<BR><BR>The insurance regulations that are part of the farm
bill need to address this disparity, because crop diversification should be
exactly what insurers want: it helps to prevent the kind of natural
disasters that insurance policies protect against, say, a devastating insect
infestation. (Of course, it gives food lovers precisely what they want: more
diversity, more variety, more flavor.) To this end, our agricultural policy
should acknowledge the role of biodiverse farms in risk management by
establishing discounts for farmers who practice this form of environmental
stewardship and removing the discriminatory 5 percent premium surcharge on
policies that encumbers organic producers under the current
system.<BR><BR>While our legislators are at it, they might also look at
another powerful paradox that chefs confront every day. If I want to
purchase a case of carrots, it’s much easier (and cheaper) to get them from
the Salinas Valley, in California, than from the Hudson Valley that
surrounds my restaurants. The food distribution system favors size. A
distributor in California can send one truck to pick up 50 cases of carrots;
a distributor procuring exclusively from the Northeast will need to send 50
trucks to 50 different farms.<BR><BR>That’s a shame, not just because a
carrot that comes to New York from California gets singed with petroleum as
it travels cross-country, but because at this time of year carrots pulled
from the rich muck dirt of Western New York have 50 times more flavor than
their West Coast counterparts.<BR><BR>Same with milk, which large industrial
dairy farms sell with the iconic label of a smiling, muscle-flexed cow in
front of open pasture and next to an old red barn. That’s tantamount to
false advertising, since the industrial dairy cow never sees a blade of
fresh grass and has very few muscles to flex after receiving hormones to
increase productivity. With 20,000 cows per farm, the animals spend a lot of
time waiting in line for the next milking, so it’s hard to imagine that
there is a lot of smiling going on.<BR><BR>False representation aside,
there’s one point the powerful dairy industry won’t let us forget: milk is
pretty cheap. But the real cost of milk is hidden in places like California,
with its heavily subsidized irrigation system; if Western dairy farmers had
to pay the real cost of the irrigation-dependent alfalfa fed to cows, New
England’s milk prices would be more competitive. And if those cows ate a
variety of grasses as they were meant to, instead of just alfalfa, “Got
Milk?” would be more “Got Rich, Delicious and Affordable
Milk?”<BR><BR>Though food transportation and irrigation subsidies exist
outside the domain of the current farm bill, their implications cannot be
overlooked as we review (and revise) our system of agriculture. The new bill
needs to level the playing field by recognizing a region’s agricultural
strength — like New England’s abundant supply of great grassland — and
encouraging farmers through subsidies and other inducements to use it
accordingly.<BR><BR>Then there’s the question of meat and poultry. A breed
of pig that tasted like pork (something other than the other white meat)? A
chicken that actually saw pasture (and tasted like ... chicken)? A steer
with fat marbled on a grass diet, or a lamb that’s been rotationally grazed?
We’re not asking for a lot, but no matter, it’s not for sale, at least not
by the big-food chain.<BR><BR>Unless you’re a farmers’ market devotee or
savvy Internet user, or happen to live near a market that supports good
animal husbandry, you depend on a system that raises animals in confinement.
That’s very large confinement — several thousand pigs to a barn, tens of
thousands of chickens. The industrial model is efficiency through
uniformity. A tastier model would be flavor through diversity — but the
current farm bill won’t allow it.<BR><BR>For one thing, federal rules
prohibit the out-of-state sale of livestock and poultry products inspected
by a state agency, which means if you want to raise more meat and expand
your farm by offering a niche product, you’re stuck doing it only in your
state — if you can find a slaughterhouse. (Oh, federally inspected
slaughterhouses are few and far between, and unless you’re an agribusiness
giant, nearly impossible get into.)<BR><BR>Local abbatoirs, besides feeling
the pressure of land prices and unwelcoming neighbors, have to contend with
unwieldy rules. A one-size-fits-all mentality dictates that mom-and-pop
slaughterhouses must follow the same rules of inspection as industrial
plants, even though these huge meat processors typically slaughter more
cattle in a single hour (390 by Agriculture Department estimates) than their
counterparts might see in a whole year.<BR><BR>Legislation to approve
state-inspected meats was introduced in the last session by Representative
Roy Blunt of Missouri. His bill calls for the Agriculture Department to
certify all satisfactory state-inspection programs, thus enabling the 2,000
existing state-inspected meat processors to enter the national market, and
paving the way for many more.<BR><BR>His bill would help, but so would a
farm bill that put up fewer roadblocks to smaller-scale livestock farms and
pulled the veil back on where our food comes from. We stamp “Made in the
U.S.A.” on blue jeans and cars — but Americans can’t find out where their
food was grown. If Congress passes — and enforces — a rule in the 2007 bill
requiring country of origin labeling, we’d be more informed about the
origins of our food supply and, to the great fear of our corporate brethren,
we might ask a lot more questions. Questions like “Who’s growing our food?”
and “How’s it being grown?” are not easily answered anymore, especially when
a package of frozen ground meat can have animal parts from as many as 20
countries.<BR><BR>Suggest to agribusiness interests that they think about
flavor, though, and you’re likely to be called an indulgent elitist who
wants to force Americans to pay more for their food and an anti-progressive
nostalgic for a bygone era of family farms.<BR><BR>I SUPPOSE, as a chef, I’m
guilty of being indulgent, but nothing like the over-indulgence of the farm
bill. The meat we end up buying at the local farmers’ market is relatively
expensive because, through the workings of agricultural legislation,
conventional meat prices are unnaturally low. I’m talking about the big boys
— the Smithfields, the Tysons and the Archer Daniels Midlands of the world —
which the farm bill subsidizes in the form of direct payments for grain
(their feed is then artificially cheap). In doing that, we indirectly
subsidize industrial farms’ pollution; the health care costs (associated
with animals bursting with corn fat, or animals reared on a constant
cocktail of antibiotics); and the costs of insuring these companies against
food-borne illness (brought on by a system that’s run amok — or should I say
that runs in muck, with animals living in their own waste).<BR><BR>We need a
farm bill that makes corporations internalize the costs they impose on
society in the same way that they internalize their profits.<BR><BR>Some
people argue that the desire to promote smaller, family-run local farms is
gratuitously effete and nostalgic. That’s just nonsense. It’s the
agriculture industry’s mind-set — high on capital, chemistry and machines —
that is actually old-fashioned. Just as the Industrial Revolution of
factories with heavy machinery and billowing black smoke is yesterday’s
news, so too are our unsustainable farming operations. Nonetheless our
legislators continue to marvel at how modern industrial farms have become,
and to invest ever more of our tax dollars into them.<BR><BR>In place of
these outmoded and untenable practices, we need a farm bill that promotes
sustainable farming research. We need increased money for the existing
Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, as well as an
overhauled version of the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food
Systems, a competitive grants program introduced in 1998 whose financing has
since disappeared. These organizations encourage and finance innovative
technologies to profit, and empower, the independent farmer.<BR><BR>We also
need to ensure more money for things like the Conservation Security Program.
Unlike most conservation programs that take land out of production, this one
offers financial support to farmers who cultivate their fields in an
environmentally sustainable manner. But enrollment in this program has been
severely restricted since its 2002 inception, in large part because of $4
billion in budget cuts. That’s a 50 percent cut in a program that supports
the basic tenets of land, water and wildlife conservation — tenets that go
hand in hand with small-scale, chemical-free and crop-diverse
agriculture.<BR><BR>These are also the tenets that built the world’s great
cuisines — Chinese, Italian, peasant French, Indian. Good gastronomy evolved
out of good farming — the best chefs have merely delivered on what farmers
have worked out over several centuries. A tomato bursting with flavor, or an
impossibly juicy leg of lamb, is no accident. If we’re able to eventually
clone that, great, but let’s do it in the name of flavor, not corporate
greed.<BR><BR>Right now, as members of Congress prepare to debate the
details of the new farm bill, let’s hope they allow the best examples of
gastronomy to be their guide. Great farming, environmental stewardship and
nutritious food will not be far behind.<BR><BR><BR>Dan Barber is the chef
and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and the creative director of the
Stone Barns Center for Food and
Agriculture.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>