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Every five years, Congress revisits and passes a massive but little understood legislation known as the Farm Bill.

This is one of those years, and the 2007 Farm Bill reauthorization is heating up to become the most scrutinized food and farm policy debate in recent history.

The Farm Bill is essentially a $90 billion tax bill for food, feed, fiber, and, more recently, fuel. Originally conceived as an emergency bailout for millions of farmers and the unemployed during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the Farm Bill has snowballed into one of the most significant forces affecting food, farming and land use in the United States.

To a large extent, the Farm Bill sets the economic rules that determine what sort of foods we Americans eat, how they taste, how much they cost and which crops are grown under what conditions.

Truth be told, the Farm Bill supports surplus monocultures of commodity crops that feed an obesity- and diabetes-inducing diet. It supports industrial megafarms and mega-animal factories, which disrupt rural economies and despoil habitats and ecosystems.

These effects aren't localized, either. They create dislocations in communities throughout the world.

While many equate Farm Bill programs with assistance for struggling family farmers, the legislation actually has two primary thrusts:

Food stamps, school lunch and other nutrition programs account for 50 percent of current spending - an average of $44 billion per year between 2000 and 2006.

Income and price supports for storable commodity crops combine for another 35 percent of spending.

The Farm Bill funds a range of other program "titles," including conservation and environment, forestry, renewable energy, research and rural development.

For decades, Farm Bill negotiations have been dominated by the "farm bloc," representatives from commodity states along with the agribusiness lobby and the antihunger caucus urban representatives aligned with hunger advocacy groups.

As a result, ever-increasing subsidies have been directed toward surplus commodity production and the livestock feedlot industry. In return, essential hunger safety net programs have survived.

The commodity crop money trail is not that difficult to follow. According to the Congressional Research Service, 84 percent of all commodity subsidies go to five crops: corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans.

Twenty-two congressional districts in seven states receive 50 percent of those payments. The richest 10 percent of farm subsidy recipients take in more than two-thirds of commodity subsidies. Three out of five farmers receive no payments at all.

Yet, very little of the agriculture we subsidize is directly edible, at least by humans. Most is either fed to cattle in confinement or processed into oils, flours, starches, sugars, industrial food additives - and, increasingly biofuels.

A stroll down the supermarket aisle demonstrates how Farm Bill dollars flow into the country's food chain. A dollar buys hundreds of more calories in the snack food, cereal or soda aisles than it does in the produce section. In budget-crunched school cafeterias, a dollar buys high-calorie processed foods like chicken nuggets, tater tots, chocolate milk and canned fruit cocktail rather than healthy ingredients.

Why? Because the Farm Bill favors the mega-production of corn (cheap high-fructose corn syrup) and soybeans (transfats and feeds) rather than regional supplies of fresh vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Of America's youngest generation, one in three is predicted to develop Type II diabetes in their lifetime.

Meanwhile, most consumer food dollars spent in farm country end up leaving the region, because our agricultural areas have effectively become "food deserts."

¡There is at least one simple solution to this. Farm and food subsidy programs could be realigned to support the federal dietary guidelines and reoriented toward food chains that produce and distribute locally grown, healthy foods.

The silver lining is that Americans actually do have a food and farm policy program to debate. Most observers agree that the era of massive giveaways to corporations and surplus commodity producers must yield to policies that reward stewardship, promote healthy diets, secure regional economies and do no harm to family farms or hungry kids and their families.

Now is the time to ask our representatives to fight the good fight for good food.