(article, Culinate staff)
It can be easy to dismiss big governmental agencies as lumbering bureaucracies, slow to change. But a recent New Yorker article shines a different light on the USDA, highlighting its innovative role a century ago in encouraging America's farmers to be, well, better farmers. What's the news hook? That the health-care reform plans currently being debated in Congress might work in the same way — fostering more efficient, cheaper, and effective health care. So maybe wheat cultivation is like brain surgery.