Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill
2007, Watershed Media
Preface by Fred Kirschenmann, Foreword by Michael Pollan
In the winter of 2006, I began a series of citizen’s guides on the Farm Bill. Every five years, the U.S. Congress passes a little understood legislation that is primarily accountable for setting the budgets and work plans for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Farm Bill is anything but bureaucratic trivia. It is an essential economic and policy engine that drives the food and farming system and provides nutritional assistance to tens of millions of Americans–many of them children. It also finances some of the country’s most significant conservation programs. Thanks to Food Fight, more and more citizens are realizing just how much is at stake in this political chess game. The book traces how the legislation has evolved, from its first incarnation during the Great Depression, to today, when America has become the world’s leading agricultural powerhouse. Readers learn, perhaps most importantly, the battles that determine the direction of food policy in the coming years.