Something is seriously wrong here. At a time when child obesity and diabetes rates are going through the roof in America, we have a national policy that encourages kids to eat nothing but sugar and salt.

We worry about family farmers losing their land to big factory farms, but this same policy drives small farmers out of business.

How is it that a bill whose express intent was to fight poverty, instead makes millions of people around the world poorer each year?

The Lunchables Brigade always looks like it’s about to have a fantastic time. Every day on TV commercials around the country, they swoop into school cafeterias and convince sullen, beaten-down kids to swap their boring old food for fun, plastic-wrapped lunches.

The brigade is everywhere. Its ever-smiling cartoon members – Oscar, Maya and Abel – stand confidently on the bright yellow backsides of Oscar Meyers’ Lunchables™ brand of ready-to-go meals in the refrigerated aisles of tens of thousands of grocery stores around the world. In addition to omnipresent television commercials on Nickelodeon and during Saturday morning cartoons, the Lunchables Brigade also has its own website. Kids can try video games like “Delicious Delivery,” where they drive a 4X4 monster truck to pick up pizzas while avoiding fences and lawn snakes. The game ends with a promotion for the new line of “Pizza and Treatza” Lunchables.

In short, the Lunchables represents of the most sophisticated marketing campaigns going. And it works. Visit a cafeteria in any suburban public school, and easily a quarter of all the kids are munching Lunchables. Last year Lunchables earned Oscar Meyer and its parent company, Kraft Worldwide Foods, $719 million, of which 20 percent was probably profit, according to experts interviewed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The power behind the army

But the engine driving the Lunchables Brigade is nothing as flashy as computer animation or kid power. It’s a creaky, 74-year-old piece of omnibus federal legislation called the Farm Bill. About every five years, Congress passes a new farm bill. The 2007 version - weighing in at over 90 billion dollars - will be drafted by Congress in the coming months. In these stories, we’ll look at how the Farm Bill plays a huge, mostly unseen role in determining which crops farmers around the world decide to grow, how many people fall into poverty every year, and what people around the globe eat every day.

As it has for the past three decades, and especially since 1996, this year’s Farm Bill will push more Americans to eat crappy food. Like Lunchables.

Let’s put a real fine point on this: Kraft Lunchables are crap.

What makes Lunchables, and so many other new “food products,” so crappy? It’s a story as complicated as the list of ingredients on the side of the box, but it all boils down to three things that the Farm Bill controls: corn, soybeans, and vegetable oil.

Anatomy of crap food

The bite-sized “pizza crusts” in a box of Lunchables “Pizza Treatzas” contain 18 ingredients, including big doses of canola oil and high fructose corn syrup, as well as soy lecithin (which helps the crusts stick together and slide easily down the gullet).

The sauce and cheese in a Pizza Treatza contain potassium sorbate and sorbic acid, related preservatives that inhibit the growth of molds, and which allow a box of Pizza Treatza to sit on a shelf for months before being eaten. The slices of pepperoni-flavored sausage are held together with Maltodextrin, which becomes a form of sugar when it hits saliva. The pizza sauce, cheese and sausage all contain various forms of sodium, while the pizza sauce and sausage also both contain potassium chloride, a cheap salt substitute that, in high doses, is used for executions by lethal injection.

After consuming this colorful but empty meal of salt, sugar and preservatives, all delivered on beds of modified corn and soy, our lucky children come to dessert. The artificially-flavored candy in each Lunchables box consists of corn syrup, sugar and hydrogenated palm kernel oil, none of which have any nutritional value, all which are made unbelievably cheap by Farm Bill subsidies.

And here’s the twist: dessert is actually the healthiest part of the meal. That’s because Oscar Meyer injects ascorbic acid into these otherwise empty “food” products, giving children 25 percent of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin C.