Weighing in on behalf of the sybarritic side of the food chain, Dan Barber, chef owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns (which wins my award for single best dish in NYC - “This Morning’s Farm Egg” on the appetizer menu), lays into the unsavory complexities of the upcoming Farm Bill debate in Congress.

It’s a giant, confusing piece and deserves a read.

No one wants farmers to suffer, especially chefs. But if we’re spending $20 billion or so a year on farm subsidies, we ought to invest in the foods we eat. And I mean eat, not process into something that resembles food. That means fewer subsidies for grains like corn and soy, and more help for growers of broccoli and tomatoes.

How do we do this? We could start by rewarding diversity over yield, basing subsidy payments not on how many acres of corn a farmer grows but on the number of varieties of crops he plants.

Ok, subsidize diversity and vegetable crops over cereals that require heavy milling and processing, such as soy, wheat and corn. Sounds great.

But the lobby and campaign money is coming from Cargill and ADM. Is it possible to make Barber’s suggestions work for the big boys too?

Suggest to agribusiness interests that they think about flavor, though, and you’re likely to be called an indulgent elitist who wants to force Americans to pay more for their food and an anti-progressive nostalgic for a bygone era of family farms.

I’m hardly a fan of Monsanto, but realistically Big Food is not going anywhere, no matter how loudly we vote with our shopping carts. The upcoming farm bill is going to keep agribusiness in mind, if only because our system hinges on it.

Big Food isn’t entirely evil either: some of these companies have been laying down roots in and capitalizing organic agriculture and naturally raised meats for years. Group Danone, the French food giant, owns organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm; McDonalds got in bed with Niman Ranch to supply subsidiary Chipotle with naturally raised meat. Every time a Chipotle outlet opens, another family farm gets added to the Niman stable.

Chock full of individual policy suggestions, Barber’s argument makes the leap to ‘large is necessarily bad’ conclusions and I’m not entirely on board. We’re an economically diverse country, we spend fewer food hours feeding ourselves than at any other time in history - there’s tremendous efficiency in that.

Isn’t there some way to preserve flavor, biodiversity and help the small farmer without sacrificing those extra hours?

These are also the tenets [small-scale, chemical-free and crop-diverse agriculture] that built the world’s great cuisines — Chinese, Italian, peasant French, Indian. Good gastronomy evolved out of good farming — the best chefs have merely delivered on what farmers have worked out over several centuries. A tomato bursting with flavor, or an impossibly juicy leg of lamb, is no accident.

Peasant cuisines where manpower and nutrition were inextricably linked produced food with more integrity and taste, true. But I’m still happy that the hours I spend on food are hours of pleasure and choice rather than necessity.

It’s winter and I love tomatoes, even crappy ones that remind me of August only in a Platonic sense. So I’m feeling a little contrarian about the accepted eco-orthodoxy that small, seasonal and artisinal is the only way forward. My diet could look awfully dull right about now: tubers and cabbages and things that make paste for the next three months. Even heritage breeds of local organic potato would make for a long winter.

I don’t know enough about each and every one of Barber’s policy points — though I’m learning — but we ought to look for ways in which small-scale and large-scale can work together.

Barber’s “this morning’s farm egg” was the best thing I ate all last year. One egg = $14.