It’s Thanksgiving week and I can’t think of a better time to talk about the farm bill.

My starting place for thinking about this topic is a short article I wrote for Politico about the previous bill: The farm bill drove me insane.

Now, House member Earl Blumenauer (Dem-Oregon) has come up with an alternative: the Food and Farm Act.  Here’s how he explains it to Civil Eats.

n a video, he calls for reform and for fixing the existing farm bill.

He explains the philosophy behind his proposals in Growing Opportunities: Reforming the Farm Bill for Every American

Not only is the Farm Bill costly and expensive, its resources are misdirected. The legislation gives too much
to the wrong people to grow the wrong food in the wrong places. This misallocation is tragic because of the
power and reach of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs authorized by this legislation
every five years. The USDA is the only agency in the federal government that can build a community from
the ground up, and tackle issues like housing and infrastructure as well as all aspects of America’s farms and
ranches.

To make this even easier, his campaign put together a small handbook in cartoon format: The Fight for Food: Why You Deserve a Better Farm Bill.  This is a terrific beginner’s guide, the best way I’ve ever seen to get started.

The main difficulty with the farm bill for everyone other than a lobbyist is that the issues get wonky right away.  Even the handout on  the highlights of Blumenauer’s bill has lots of wonky details and requires close attention.

I particularly like what he proposes as Title IX: Regional Food Systems (my translations):

• Identifies the benefits
• Expands federal investment
• Increases funding for specialty crops (USDA-speak for fruits and vegetables)
• Invests in local and regional systems infrastructure
• Funds local and regional meat processing
• Increases transparency of USDA’s grant process
• Protects small farmers from retaliation

Idealistic?  Yes!

Possible?  Maybe, if we can ever get the political will.

Here’s something positive to support.  Get to work!

Policy wonks, students, advocates:  If you are looking for data on what countries are doing to promote healthier people and food systems, check out these resources:

• Global Database for City and Regional Food Policies: Thanks to the University at Buffalo, the UB Food Lab, the Community for Global Health Equity, and the RUAF Foundation  (Global partnership on sustainable Urban Agriculture and Food systems) for this collection of 16 policies, searchable by keywords, location, language, and population size,
• Growing Food Connections policy database: This one is for just the U.S, and Canada.
• Food systems resources for city and regional governments are here.
• The Nourishing Framework Database: This one, from the World Cancer Research Fund, International, collects policies aimed at preventing overweight and obesity.

Advocates: these are great sources of ideas.

Food Policy Action has released its annual scorecard, evaluating how our federal legislators vote on food issues.  In case you haven’t noticed, they aren’t voting on much these days so there wasn’t much to score.

In the Senate, there was only one vote (on the nomination of Scott Pruitt as USDA Secretary), although ten bills were introduced.

In the House, there were five votes and 11 bills.

Overall scores averaged 49%—dismal.

The site has a handy interactive map; click on it to see how your legislators are voting.

In case you want to see just how badly Congress is doing, I’ve been posting these scorecards since they started:

• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013

One thought: maybe it’s just as well.

If you search this site for “Sugar Policy,” you will get lots of items over the years.

Now, several members of Congress have introduced a bill, the Sugar Policy Modernization Act, to remove price supports and repeal marketing allotments and quotas.

These keep the price of sugar produced in the U.S. artificially high, but not so high that the public complains.

Industrial users of sugar—candy and soda makers, for example—want to buy sugar at cheaper worldwide market rates.

Good luck with trying to do this. Big Sugar is happy with the current system and lobbies with great effect to make sure it stays that way.

Representatives from the House Sugar Caucus (yes, there is one) sent a letter to fellow members of Congress urging them to vote against this proposal.

The Sugar Program Modernization Act would upend this success and reward the world’s worst subsidizers at the expense of U.S. sugar farmers. While a handful of food manufacturers would benefit under the Sugar Program Modernization Act, farmers, sugar workers, rural communities, and consumers would lose out. That is too steep a price to pay so multinational food conglomerates can pad their profits.

But politics makes strange bedfellows.  The American Enterprise Institute has a new analysis of sugar policies. Its key points?

• The US sugar program is a protectionist scheme destined to transfer income to sugar growers and processors at the cost of sugar users and consumers.
• The losses to consumers and users are large in aggregate for the country, in the order of $2.4–$4 billion.
• The major recommendation is the total removal of the sugar program’s main components, including tariff-rate quotas, allotments, and sugar loan rates.

It’s hard to know how this will play out this year.  History favors a win for Big Sugar.  They run politics in Louisiana and Florida,  But this too will be interesting to watch.

The World Health Organization has issued guidelines on use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals.  Its latest report recommends:

• An overall reduction in use
• Complete restriction in use for growth promotion
• Complete restriction of use for infectious disease prevention
• Not using them for disease treatment

For comparison, the FDA bans these antibiotics for growth promotion, but permits when recommended by a veterinarian when necessary for an animal’s health.

Antibiotics used in food animal production amount to 80 percent of antibiotic consumption worldwide.

Studies show that restricting antibiotic use in animals will reduce their prevalence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

As you might expect, opinions about this report are divided.  Consumer groups, who have been advocating for these practices for years, are eager for the guidelines to be implemented immediately.  So are companies like Perdue, which are already doing this.

Opposition comes from the meat industry, of course, but also the chief scientist of USDA who must not have read the guidelines carefully, if at all.

The WHO guidelines are not in alignment with U.S. policy and are not supported by sound science. The recommendations erroneously conflate disease prevention with growth promotion in animals.

The WHO report may help advocates get some long-awaited action on antibiotics, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

I just came across this report from the CDC: 2017 Antibiotic use in the U.S.: Progress and Opportunities.  It is This report is notable for focusing exclusively on antibiotics in human health.  It excludes any discussion of antibiotic use in animals—as if there were no relationship.

It’s time to bring agricultural policies in line with health policies!

I’m going to be using this week’s posts to catch up on reports that have been flooding in.

Let’s start with a publication from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and Friends of the Earth Europe.

Agrifood Atlas: Facts and figures about the Corporations that Control What We Eat

Agrifood corporations are driving industrialization along the entire global value chain, from farm to plate. Their purchasing and sales policies promote a form of agriculture that revolves around productivity. The fight for market share is achieved at the expense of the weakest links in the chain: farmers, and workers…It is high time for a socially and politically oriented regulation of the agrifood industry.

The Atlas provides the facts and figures you need to advocate for healthier food systems.

Here is one example:

Bryant Simon The Hamlet Fire, A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives. The New Press.

This book, which deserves a much better cover, tells a compelling story.  Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University, has written an epic book about industrialized broiler production.  His starting point is the tragic fire that killed 25 people in a poultry processing plant in 1991, in Hamlet, North Carolina.

It’s inconceivable that this plant, which made cheap chicken fingers for fast food outlets, had locked exit doors—nearly a century after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (which is still commemorated every March 25 in front of the building, now owned by NYU).

To explain the meaning of the fire, Simon takes on globalization’s effect in promoting industrialized chicken production; the loss of well paying jobs in small rural communities led to surplus labor that made it possible to produce cheap chicken and even cheaper chicken products.

Simon links these events to the increasing prevalence of obesity among overworked and underpaid laborers in rural communities.   His stories of workers in chicken processing plants make it clear how they have to deal with the social, racial, and political issues that confront families in rural America.

The costs of cheap food, Simon says eloquently, are borne by the workers and communities that produce it.

And how is the fabulous Nathan doing that?  By releasing Modernist Bread this week.

Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya.  Modernist Bread.  The Cooking Lab, 2017.

If you have a spare $600 or so, this 53-pound set of coffee-table books will make you happy.  If you don’t, plead with your local library to purchase a set.

The books are beyond gorgeous—lavishly illustrated and full of the facts, figures, and results of the Lab’s years of experiments on the history, culture, and deliciousness of bread and bread making.

These books beg to be examined—but also used.  That’s why they come with a 6th volume—a user’s guide.  For that alone….