Recommended: “You Are What You Grow”

Please stop by the New York Times and read Michael Pollan’s article on the United States’s farm bill and its implications for national health, global economics and immigration.

Just one nugget from the article:

By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s.

The farm bill, by the way, is up for renewal again this year. So educate yourself about the bill’s effects and holler at your Congressperson.