Mark Bittman: Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them

Mark Bittman, who write for the NYTimes and has a number of amazing and comprehensive cookbooks (including two that we own: How to Cook Everything and The Food Matters Cookbook), has an opinion piece up about farm subisidies.

Agricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills.

Yet — like so many government programs — what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and its political cronies.

Maybe he's been teaming up with Michael Pollan or something, but he's getting more political here and I like it. Even though I think my family members who farm feed crops out in Kansas are recipients of these subsidies, wouldn't it be great to instead subsidize farmers for growing fruits and vegetables? Think about the reduced health care costs if we made healthy food cheaper and meat and HFCS more expensive!

The farm bill, up for renewal in 2012, includes an agricultural subsidy portion worth up to $30 billion, $5 billion of which is what you might call handouts, direct payments to farmers.

The subsidy-suckers don’t grow the fresh fruits and vegetables that should be dominating our diet. Indeed, if all Americans decided to actually eat the five servings a day of fruits and vegetables that are recommended, they would discover that American agriculture isn’t set up to meet that need. They grow what they’re paid to grow: corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

The first two of these are the pillars for the typical American diet — featuring an unnaturally large consumption of meat, never-before-seen junk food and a bizarre avoidance of plants — as well as the fortunes of Pepsi, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC and the others that have relied on cheap corn and soy to build their empires of unhealthful food. Over the years, prices of fresh produce have risen, while those of meat, poultry, sweets, fats and oils, and especially soda, have fallen. (Tom Philpott, writing in the environment and food Web site Grist and citing a Tufts University study, reckons that between 1997 and 2005 subsidies saved chicken, pork, beef and HFCS producers roughly $26.5 billion. In the short term, that saved consumers money too — prices for these foods are unjustifiably low — but at what cost to the environment, our food choices and our health?)

Well, we'll see what happens. I don't think it helps that Iowa is the first state up in the presidential race, but you never know. Maybe we can get some collective common sense and overcome the corporate lobbyists of agro-business who benefit from our handouts to them -- talk about welfare queens!

Here are his recommendations:

• Provide necessary incentives to attract the 100,000 new farmers Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack claims we need.

• Save more farmland from development.

• Provide support for farmers who grow currently unsubsidized fruits, vegetables and beans, while providing incentives for monoculture commodity farmers to convert some of their operations to these more desirable foods.