There’s a great op-ed today in the New York Times by chef Dan Barber, “Amber Fields of Bland.” He argues in a very smart way for changing federal food regulations. Rather than bombard you with truly horrible details about what’s wrong with the current food production system, he asks: Don’t you just want your food to taste good?

Eerybody laments how crappy tomatoes are now (not Barber’s exampe, just my personal gripe), and how chicken doesn’t even taste like chicken. Whose fault is that? Stupid agribusiness. And of course there are all the other gruesome flaws (E. coli, zombie chickens, mad cow, etc.), but, Barber says, if we look at regulating in terms of improving food’s flavor, then, by happy coincidence, we also solve a lot of these problems.

Of course, coming from a super-high-end chef who cooks for rich people all day long, arguing for flavor in the face of economies of scale smacks of plain old snobbery. But he dismisses that with a smart historical analogy:

Some people argue that the desire to promote smaller, family-run local farms is gratuitously effete and nostalgic. That’s just nonsense. It’s the agriculture industry’s mind-set — high on capital, chemistry and machines — that is actually old-fashioned. Just as the Industrial Revolution of factories with heavy machinery and billowing black smoke is yesterday’s news, so too are our unsustainable farming operations.

It is interesting that he doesn’t argue against farm subsidies per se–I guess that would be just way too crazy to consider–but he does suggest giving them instead to farms as an incentive to diversify and concentrate on food crops, rather than corn and soy, which need to be hyper-processed before being eaten. Maybe that is a good middle route.

This whole op-ed is linked to the fact that the every-five-years reexamination of the farm bill is coming up in Congress soon. As Barber proposes, anyone who cares how food tastes–never mind their stance on or knowledge about Big Food Biz–should speak up to their representatives now. Maybe some tasty treat mailed to Senators Clinton and Schumer would be more effective than a phone call?