Quick, while Paris is in jail and the politicians annointed as "official" candidates by CNN and Fox are poking each others' eyes out, let's take a moment to talk about the Farm Bill. (Yeah, right.) Seriously, because you are what you eat, you know. (Yeah, right.)

There's probably no clearer voice in America about the business of food than Michael Pollan's. In his award-winning book, The Omnivore's Dilemma and in regular newspaper articles, he brings both passion (for fresh, local ingredients) and clarity (the result of feet-on-the ground research) to the table.

A recent piece in the New York Times was a reminder that the Farm Bill is one of the country's most important pieces of social engineering. Up for renewal shortly, it sets the broad outlines of American agricultural policy, subsidizing just five commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton), thus determining what gets grown where.

This subsidized overproduction puts cheap processed food on supermarket shelves (so poor people often eat unhealthy diets) and cheap corn- and soy-based exports that undermine agriculture in developing countries (often forcing Latin American farmers off the land to seek work in the US).

Agricultural policy is a classic MEGO topic, and that's what the corn lobby is counting on. But a guy named Earl Blumenauer is sending up some flares. He's a "Democrat" congressman from Oregon's 3rd District (encompassing Portland--so he qualifies as a Seattlest neighbor) and, more to the point, a savvy blogger. Although he represents a decidedly urban constituency, he wants to see a farm policy that makes sense, that supports family farmers, that ensures a healthy food supply.

Blumenauer's a guest columnist this week on TPMCafe.com, an online forum that grew out of the liberal Talking Points Memo. And he's got his own blog, where he's laying out a Food & Farmer Bill of Rights.

What harm has our government's official policy wrought? For a start, Blumenauer writes, "Fruits, vegetables, and row crops are largely bypassed in favor of lavish subsidies for a few commodities." Just one example: the well-intentioned but archaic policy to prop up the price of sugar during the Depression has backfired; today, it's doing nothing to help the domestic sugar industry while making it impossible for Third World cane farmers to survive.

While we're at it, think how silly it is for sugar grown in Hawaii to be refined in California, shipped to New York for packaging and shipped back to Hawaii in one-gram paper packets. Not just silly but wasteful.