Department of Agriculture, United States

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has grown over the past 150 years from a small government office with sub-Cabinet status to a giant Cabinet-level bureaucracy with over 100,000 employees. In addition to agriculture, the USDA has had an enormous impact on American cooking and nutrition, helping transform the American diet. The USDA is divided into seven large agencies: Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services; Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services; Food Safety; Marketing and Regulatory Programs; Natural Resources and Environment; Research, Education, and Economics; and Rural Development. Under each large agency are many smaller services; together, these groups constitute the largest single agricultural organization in the world, devoted to agricultural research and aid and the dissemination of agricultural information. The USDA’s specific functions are enormously broad, ranging from lending programs for farming cooperatives to forestry to home economics and human nutrition. Its impact on the American diet is both direct, through nutrition standards and the like, and indirect—for example, the effect of food price supports on the price and thus on the public demand for various foods. The focus here is on those areas with a direct influence on the American diet.