Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to The Next Food and Farm Bill, Revised and Updated Edition [Paperback]

Daniel Imhoff (Author), Fred Kirschenmann (Introduction)

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Product Details

Paperback: 215 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (Oct 15 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0970950071
ISBN-13: 978-0970950079
Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 20.3 x 1.5 cm
Shipping Weight: 408 g

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Product Description

Every five years, the U.S. Congress passes a little understood legislation called the Farm Bill. It is primarily accountable for setting the budgets and work plans for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the Farm Bill is anything but bureaucratic trivia. Rather, it's is an essential economic and policy engine that drives the food and farming system. Just as importantly, it provides nutritional assistance to tens of millions of Americans--many of them children. In recent years, more and more citizens are realizing just how much is at stake in this political chess game. Originally published in 2007, Food Fight was Daniel Imhoff 's highly acclaimed primer on the 2008 Farm Bill. Now in a newly updated and expanded edition, Imhoff looks ahead at this all important issue, as the debate for 2012 is already underway. With the legislation due to be reauthorized in late 2012, Food Fight offers readers a critical resource that can help them deconstruct this challenging bill, organize in their communities to gain a seat at the bargaining table, and ultimately vote with their forks.

About the Author

Daniel Imhoff is an award-winning author and publisher whose many books include Farming with the Wild, Building with Vision, and Paper or Plastic.
He is the editor of CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories and co-editor of Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature. Among many interests, he grows food for his family on a small homestead farm in Northern California.

Inside This Book (Learn More)

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Amazon.com: 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Shedding light on a key but obscure federal law, Mar 6 2012

By C. Ackerman - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to The Next Food and Farm Bill, Revised and Updated Edition (Paperback)

The second edition of Food Fight (February 2012) is a systematic overview for citizens of the labyrinths of a powerful piece of federal legislation commonly referred to as the Farm Bill, which is up for renewal as the 2008 Farm Bill is set to expire this year. With the assistance of many graphs and charts, it breaks down this colossus into as simple and understandable components: commodity crops, crop insurance, conservation, exports, etc. --- including the mammoth allocation that now goes to "nutrition", which involves SNAP (a.k.a., food stamps) and a gamut of smaller programs.

The author gives a history and critique of each component of the Farm Bill. He is especially critical of how the allocations (and budget cuts) directed at farmers have shaped the agricultural landscape, creating perverse incentives to consolidate (subsiding agribusiness oligopolies) and to abuse the land. (The author doesn't quite say it, but nothing seems to cut the funding for conservation programs faster than their demonstrated effectiveness.)

This book does an excellent job of making comprehensible an opaque subject matter, and as such will be a useful reference (probably even after the passage of the next Farm Bill passes). If someone wanted to be critical, there are several areas that could be pointed out. First, as a revision of a book written for the 2008, it suffers from the same problem that often afflicts second editions, namely you're never sure how much they're actually updated. Judging from the data, it looks like this book has been substantially overhauled, far more than is usual for books. There is, however, one sentence that implies 2009 is in the future, and that's jarring.

The second issue is one that is inherent in the subject matter. The Farm Bill is so sprawling, so far reaching, so connected to global events and influenced by tens of millions of agribusiness lobbyist dollars, it's hard to see how the average person the street can have an impact. Toward the end of the book, there are some suggestions, like getting your city to adopt something like the Seattle Farm Bill principles, but the sheer magnitude of the bill seems to dwarf the proposed actions. Likewise, becoming engaged on this is something like a full-time job, making it hard for ordinary people to stay active. As a result, some readers will likely not be so much angered and inspired (as intended) but daunted and paralyzed.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review 4.0 out of 5 stars