Here`s a knee-slapper for you: The federal government has used your hard- earned tax dollars to pay for research into the growing of Belgian endive.
That`s right, Belgian endive, that pale, wrinkled leaf that gourmets like in their tossed salads.
You don`t think that`s so ridiculous?
Well, President Bush apparently does. He mentioned Belgian endive research Tuesday night in his State of the Union address. It was toward the end of the speech, when he was ticking off examples of ”outrageous” pork barrel appropriations by Congress. You know, the kind of wasteful spending that makes it hard to balance the federal budget.
The endive remark caught my attention because I had seen it before. It was on a long list of odd-sounding tax-supported research projects published by a group called The Heritage Foundation.
The list noted that a $67,000 research grant to the University of Massachusetts for exploring the commercial potential of domestically grown Belgian endive had been budgeted in fiscal 1991 by the Department of Agriculture. The foundation listed it on the same page as a $73,000 grant to North Dakota researchers for grasshopper biocontrol and a $25,000 subsidy to Oklahoma scientists working to defeat the pecan weevil.
The Washington-based Heritage Foundation is one of those conservative think tanks that hire like-minded experts to research and write about public policy issues. Much of their funding comes from tax-deductible contributions by wealthy right-wing industrialists. The big hitter on Heritage`s letterhead is Joseph Coors, the Colorado beer baron.
The results of this ”research” are turned into highly readable essays and reports that are mailed to news media around the country. You often see their work on newspaper op-ed pages. Professionally written and edited, it is a godsend for overworked op-ed editors and far easier to process than the scrawled ramblings of some irate citizen.
The foundation`s ”findings” are very predictable: The rich pay more than their fair share of taxes; too much welfare corrupts the poor; too much government meddling clogs the free-enterprise system; and, of course, too much government money is spent on frivolous projects.
Normally, I toss my Heritage mail into the round file. (I don`t pay much attention to position papers by left-wing groups, either. Ideologues make me nervous.) But I saved the Heritage ”Backgrounder” that listed page after page of wasteful-sounding research projects. It was cleverly done. The Heritage researchers must have had fun combing through the federal budget for silly-sounding terms such as soybean cyst nemotode, witchweed and cattle ticks.
But I knew there must be another side to the story. And after listening to Bush join in the fun Tuesday night, I decided to make a few calls.
Turns out that a lot of very well-informed people don`t think there`s anything funny about studying pecan weevils or screwworms.
”You take the soybean cyst nemotode,” said W.R. ”Reg” Gomes, dean of the University of Illinois College of Agriculture. ”Left uncontrolled, it could devastate the entire soybean industry in the Midwest. That would be economic disaster. In Illinois, 20 percent of the labor force is involved in the food industry. Only 2 percent produce the food, but the multiplier is 10 when you count those who work for companies like Kraft.”
More Top Picks Best Epabo Contour Pillows For Tech Neck
So I asked Dean Gomes why we taxpayers have to pay for this research. Why not Kraft or Archer-Daniels-Midland?
”They spend millions on product research,” Gomes said. ”But for basic, broadly applicable scientific research that will be available to everybody, we depend on the public sector.
”When I was a boy,” he said, ”I probably would have thought it funny that somebody named Jonas Salk was spending all his time looking at attenuated samples of the poliomyelitis virus. But he did, and now we have a polio vaccine.”
As for that study of Belgian endive, the one held up for ridicule by Bush, it was something of a bust. A University of Massachusetts professor familiar with the project said the price of endive has fallen to the point that it no longer makes economic sense for New England farmers to convert their fields to the finicky plant, which must be moved indoors for its final growth stage.
But Dean Gomes at the U. of I. says that`s the nature of agricultural research.
”You ask the question and sometimes the answer is `No,` ” said Gomes. He mentioned that similar research led to the domestic production of kiwi, a fruit that had been imported from the Southern Hemisphere.
”This is some of the most important research we do,” Gomes said of the projects on the Heritage laugh list. ”Most of it is about the prevention and cure of disease, about safe food and the safe delivery and preparation of that food.
”I certainly wouldn`t try to judge the value of a piece of research based on its short title,” Gomes said. ”To do that, it helps to be ignorant.”
Makes you wonder about the state of the union.