Do You Know What the "Farm Bill" Is?

"You are what you eat." And if what you eat is mostly garbage, well, you know the rest. Unfortunately, a lot of what we eat nowadays is chemical-laden garbage. What we eat probably affects our health more than anything else that we do.

I'm not just talking about fast food here though we all know how bad that stuff is. Take it from somebody who was in the business for a lot of years and has eaten a lot of the stuff. In my one tenure at a certain hamburger chain I figure that I ate about 3,000 of the burgers.

But some of the stuff that we buy at the grocery store isn't much better. Most of the meat and poultry comes from factory farms as well as the fruit and vegetables. It's all about getting the most production and it doesn't matter how much chemicals and hormones that you use to get the most out of the livestock and the plants. This robs them of vital nutrients and trace elements that you would get if they were grown on a small family farm instead of a big factory.

The big villain today is corn syrup. It's literally in everything. That and soy. At least soy has some nutrients, but corn syrup is just pure sugar. But not as good as sugar. According to The Healthy Planet:

"What is in the U.S. package of legislation collectively known as "The Farm Bill" also affects your health. It also affects your bank account, your water, your air, and the soil upon which agriculture depends. With so much health and tens of billions of dollars riding on a bundle of legislation that is reauthorized every five years, we all need to know more about it."

The Farm Bill not only shapes the future of agriculture and pushes corn syrup, it also helps shape our energy policy. It subsidizes certain biomass fuels as well as ethanol, which is made from guess what? Corn.

The Farm Bill also provides crop insurance to those who own the farms as well as subsidizing the farmers. Remember when farmers were dumping out their milk on the ground because the price went so low? The subsidies are supposed to prevent that from happening. But the farmers still get the subsidies even when the prices are high.

This year (2011) is the year that the next farm bill will be debated and passed into law. The more people that are well informed about it, the better, because this bill affects everything that we as a country grow and sell. It even determines which type of wildlife that we protect.

So get involved. Learn what's in the next bill. Do some research and contact your congressman. We need to do our part to keep special interests out, especially here in the Midwest.

Source: http://www.thehealthyplanet.com/jan2011_coalition.htm