Grains are the traditional food for surviving famine, but not the optimum diet. There is a reason why people getting food stuffs over the last few decades, and also the groceries, emphasize this kind of thing. It's the highest profit with the longest shelf life, for the least cost and now people are getting educated and rebelling against it. The food pyramid and medical guidelines have been distorted by commercial interests.
At one time, the subsidies yielded benefits in a variety of food stuffs, from milk, butter, cheese, grains, sugar, flour, eggs, meats, tubers to fruits and vegetables. These were the staples of the school cafeterias when I was growing up, prepared in large kitchens. Fresh bread and other things, all from scratch, basically home cooking with a lot of variety and probably good nutrition. The government sent those commodities to the school to keep the prices up so farmers could stay in business. And to carry them for resting the land, crop rotation, to prevent soil depletion, pollution and erosion. No one seems to know anything about this anymore.
Over time, people that had no relationship to farming found ways to get the money for themselves. We had Farm Aid concerts to put the band-aid on a system that was eating up the people these programs were set up to nurture and protect. This has not stopped.
Many who would farm, were also run off their land not by the banks as usual, but by the developers who saw their land as easy pickings for subdivisions. They got with 'leaders' and zoned them out, some made bogus claims under the guise of protecting the environment against the farmers to get them to sell.
As subdivisions met the borders of the existing farms, the ones that were holding out were harassed for being a nuisance. As higher income people moved in, they wanted all the small businesses that formerly supplied the farmers zoned out, working for gentrification. The pressure on farmers is high.
What the GOP teabaggers did in this last vote, really showed they sided with the corporations, and didn't even side with farmers. Real farmers, that is. They not only set about starving the part of the program that was created to end hunger by giving cheap food to public institutions to distribute at schools and other places, but to save the farming communities.
These agribusinesses are not good stewards of the land, and they don't answer to the communities where they use mechanized means and chemicals and altered crops to simply give them all profit and nothing else. They mine the land, either for minerals or grains, but it's all about their money. I don't know what good this information does, other than serve as another statistical marker. The problem is that America is eating itself.
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