OK, so this is not perhaps as sexy sounding as the “sustainability smackdown” between Michael Pollan and John Mackey Tuesday, but it’s about 100 times more important. If you want to continue to be able to eat sustainable, organic, and local food — and help the rest of the country eat it, too — then you need to learn and care about the 2007 Farm Bill. (Alas, the ethical component of SOLE food isn’t going to be figuring much into this piece of legislation.)
The best place to start is with the March 21 teach-in at Berkeley that Pollan will moderate. The participants are Dan Imhoff, the author of the just-published Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill (cover image, left); George Naylor, Iowa corn farmer and president of the National Family Farms Coalition; Ann Cooper, director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley school system; Ken Cook*, president of the Environmental Working Group (and Mulch blogger); and others.
Imhoff is particularly good at zeroing in on the real meat in this formerly obscure piece of legislation; as he says, “The Farm Bill is essentially a $90 billion tax bill for food, feed, fiber, and more recently, fuel.” Naylor is the Iowa corn farmer Pollan visited in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” And Cooper? You may know her as the feisty Lunch Lady that the Chez Panisse Foundation hired to revamp Berkeley’s school-food system. She’ll be there because about half of the Farm Bill goes to food stamps, school lunches, and other nutrition programs.
Tickets are on salenow. Again, the Journalism School has unfortunately decided to have the event at 900-seat Wheeler — I guess they think people will be less excited by the wonky Farm Bill than they were by Whole Foods. Prove them wrong.
They are available online: call (510) 642-9988 or pick them up in person from the Zellerbach Hall ticket office on campus. Note: Seating is assigned.
*Updated 3/13
Food, Farming, & Food Politics events calendar
Humor:
March 4th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
What we really need is to eliminate all subsidies. Not just with the Farm Bill, although that would be a start, but in all sectors. Subsidies help the big guys who can afford to compete for them but they hurt the rest of us, the 90% of farmers and other business people who don’t get subsidies. They hurt because they create an unlevel playing field where the subsidized businesses compete unfairly and can offer a lower price. They even hurt Buy Local because they reduce the cost of transportation through subsidizing of Big Oil. Eliminate all subsidies would cut the budget. Throw out the entire tax code, institute a simple flat tax on income over the 2x the minimum wage and institute a consumption tax. That is all progressive, fair and simple. People would pay the tax every time they buy stuff so they would see and feel it.