Posted on 01/22/2007 6:10:29 PM PST by Lorianne
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Now, the complaint is that my Belgian Endive lacks flavor.
It's true that WE eat the broccoli and tomatoes. But livestock -- cattle, hogs, chickens -- eat the corn and soy. Then we eat the cattle, hogs, and chickens.
So once again, we have a liberal whose ignorance of agriculture is matched only by his arrogance in prescribing menus for the rest of us.
Abolish the USDA and all it's transfer payments. Let the market dictate what is grown and at what price. Why is that so hard?
Says something about our time and era...
No, that money should immediately go back to where it came from. I'd like to invest more of my money in the food my family eats -- or anything else they might need for that matter.
or we could just get rid of subsidies altogether and just rely on good old supply and demand.
Nope, too risky. Supply and demand NEVER works. Must rely on government dictates instead.
The futures market has nothing to do with the government. It's just private individuals negotiating for the delivery of commondities at some point in the future.
I don't see a transition problem. Just abolish the USDA and end all govt. subsidies Jan 1, 2008. The government has little to do with producing or distributing food, it just shuffles taxpayer money to a bunch of mostly large landowners, deer hunters, etc., very few of whom ever plant a grain of corn in anger.
This I will agree with.
I spent a lot of time on farms growing up. My grandparents, aunts and uncles had farms that produced a lot of the food we ate.
The chickens were free to roam and eat whatever they could find and the hogs ate table scraps along with grain.
The factory chickens today are tasteless and soft compared to the ones I ate in my youth as is the pork and beef.
Yes we have the most inexpensive and safest food supply in the world but we have paid a price in some of the pleasure of taste.
I rarely eat chicken today unless it is highly seasoned. I really miss the fried chicken of my youth that was tasty and the smell of it frying was heaven.
What I have learned to do to compensate is marinade any meat overnight to give it flavor, but it is not the same.
There are ways to find real food. You have to do the research to find it in your area of the country. We have stores here where we can buy chicken that was raised the old-fashioned way. There is a lady at the local farmers market who sells her homegrown chickens on Wednesdays. There is also a number of CSA's that we can buy into to get very good produce and eggs. If you really miss it, you can find it. Just expect to pay for the work the farmer put in to grow the better products.
Home grown produce is fairly easy to find. Free range chicken or meat is very difficult to find and there is no way to tell if it really is unless you know the seller personally.
Now, the complaint is that my Belgian Endive lacks flavor.
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I know not of Belgian Endive but I can tell you from first hand knowledge that the chicken and pork and probably the beef that you buy in the stores taste nothing like what home grown chicken and pork taste like. The last time I had a taste of real chicken I was amazed, I thought it was simply my aging taste buds but real chicken still tastes like real chicken. Tyson chicken tastes like hormones and antibiotics. For breakfast an hour ago I had sausage made from a pig that my brother shot, there are wild hogs roaming the woods where I used to hunt squirrels and the pork is much tastier than the squirrels ever were.
Of course I have known for fifty years that store bought vegetables don't hold a candle to those we used to pick from our own gardens. I can't imagine how anyone could dispute that.
Produce varieties are selected by farmers and middlemen because they are easily harvested, stored, and transported. Taste takes a back seat. (Q.v.The 6 foot drop test for tomatos. Cardboard tomatos fare best; or the fraudulently named Red "Delicious" apple--pretty as a trophy wife.) Some of the best apple and tomato varieties don't ship well.
When I first moved out into the country, my wife insisted on keeping some chickens for their eggs. We were surprised how much "eggier" the eggs tasted than what we got from the store.
And when my wife make a "yellow cake", it turned out to be orange, not yellow, because the egg yolks were more orange than yellow.
Someone told me it was because our chickens roamed around and ate insects, which gave them additional protein.
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