By Dan Barber, New York Times, January 14, 2007
THERE'S invariably something risky, if not risible, about allowing Congress to decide what's for dinner. 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, creating an agricultural economy that looks more Wall Street than Main Street.
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.
