"I didn't realize my mother was a good cook until after I moved out the house�I had one of those mothers, you know, no matter what you want she has the ingredients at home. You say, 'Mom, I wanna stop and get some McDonald's.' And she goes, 'I got hamburger meat at home.' You say, 'But I want McDonald's hamburger!' and she says, 'I'll make you a hamburger better than McDonald's'� And she take the egg and the green peppers and the onions and chop the green pepper up in big chunks�and put paprika and all this shit in�And you're thinkin' to yourself, that don't look like no McDonald's�And the other kids got McDonald's! And you standing there with this big house-burger. And kids are honest, they say, 'Uh! Where you get that big welfare-green pepper-burger?' And you cry, 'Uhhhh, my mama maaade it!'"
-- Eddie Murphy, from "Raw"

As children of the '80s, we were the first generation for whom Ronald McDonald was as readily recognizable as Santa Claus, and our comfort foods are more likely to come from a drive-thru window than a home kitchen. It was during our childhood that the junk food era truly arrived. We were in elementary school when advertisers discovered that impressionable children, with their fickle tastes and bandwagon-hopping habits, made excellent targets. We begged for Happy Meals with the latest plastic action figures. Our Saturday morning cartoon fest turned into a sugary cereals advertising blitz: "Gotta have my Pops � Just follow your nose! � Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids � I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!" Advertisers bypassed the parents and marketed directly to kids, causing a proliferation of products that were every kid's dream and every parent's nightmare--for example, Cookie Crisps, a cereal that is unabashedly just cookies. Commercials conditioned us to want to tag along on trips to the grocery store, but only so that we could slip Pop Tarts into the shopping cart when Mom wasn't looking.
My childhood home in Southern California was just five freeway exits from the birthplace of McDonald's, and, despite my parents' best efforts to feed me vegetables, I developed a taste for those greasy, crisp hash brown patties at an early age, as did many of my peers. These childhood eating habits weigh heavily in determining what we will eat as adults; the tastes and preferences we develop as children tend to stick with us. Wholesome, natural foods are often touted in gourmet circles as tasting superior, but this is unlikely to be the case for anyone who acquired a taste for salt and fat by age five. I still crave McDonald's hash browns. As a kid, the only thing keeping me from them was my parents. So what happens when the Fast Food Generation strikes out on its own? Well, it isn't pretty.

When I left home, I knew nothing about food -- not how to cook it, certainly not how to produce it, not even how long it might keep in the fridge. I can't blame this on my parents, since I was better off than many of my peers: I at least knew how to scramble eggs. Certainly, few teenagers are worried about their inability to provide themselves with food. There will always be a burrito stand, a fast food place or a convenience store packed with easily recognized microwaveables to the rescue. And in college dorms, there is the under-appreciated Mom-substitute, the dining hall.

After a year of dorm food -- which, being the undiscriminating glutton that I regret to admit I was, I quite enjoyed -- I moved into an apartment with friends and realized I was utterly helpless when it came to food. We all were. Not that we went hungry, of course. Every college town has its share of cheap-food entrepreneurs, preying on the food ignorant. We stocked up on Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Top Ramen, ordered pizza and grabbed burritos. Needless to say, a serving of Top Ramen doesn't pack much nutritional punch: 2 percent of your daily Iron, 0 percent of your daily Vitamin A, Vitamin C and Calcium. One 18 year-old student of my acquaintance rushed to the doctor within months of entering an Ivy League university, complaining of severe constipation. The doctor's first question: "When was the last time you ate a vegetable?" Not since her last trip home. And while eating out of a box may seem cheap--a packet of Top Ramen is always under 50 cents -- you pay a lot for convenience. Noodles with spice costs much less if you make it yourself--and that's not even considering the environmental and human health costs.

Of course, there are the exceptional youths that do turn on the oven. Many young women, myself included, and a handful of young men, learn a family recipe or two, or at least have some familiarity with how cooking works. There are the creative kitchen types, who approach cooking as a strictly imaginative enterprise. They create a sandwich of peanut butter, pickles and Tabasco sauce and can't wait for you to taste it. And, true, there is the occasional gourmet among us, like a roommate of mine who, within a month of living on his own, insisted on making vegetable stock from scratch and scoffed at my use of bouillon cubes. But this gourmet approach seems to transform cooking into a sort of elite hobby. It doesn't recognize the utter practicality of it, the need to supply yourself with edibles. Young gourmets may spend four hours making one elaborate dinner with the help of many sous-chefs, but then get take-out the rest of the week. And in the end, most young people wouldn't last a week without help from the food machine. In the words of Carl's Jr.: "Without us, some guys would starve."

		As each generation gets further from the farm and closer to the strip mall, our dependence on convenient, prepared foods is pushing us deeper into oblivion.

I spent the first few months on my own learning to add flavor packets to various kinds of boxed rice and pasta. I wasn't feeling too healthy and my tastebuds were mired in depression. The day I bought the same grease-trap burrito for both lunch and dinner, I decided that something had to change. I broke out the Joy of Cooking.

Cooking turned out to be pretty easy. Once I had mastered boiling pasta, I moved on to tomato sauce, then on to lentil soup, and so on, all the way up to cheese soufflé. It was a gradual process, but by my senior year, I was pretty handy in the kitchen and my friends thought I was a total domesticated freak. In one of our early cooking attempts, my boyfriend and I baked Bisquick biscuits in a toaster oven (the only cooking apparatus that served the twenty-some people in his boarding house) and his housemates crowded the kitchen to laugh at the spectacle--not because it was pathetic that we were making Bisquick biscuits in a tiny toaster oven, but because we were earnestly baking.

When I learned how to cook, I got curious. On the now rare occasions when I ate out, I wondered how I could reproduce each item. Some fancy things turned out to be easy: Pesto pasta was a 20-minute affair requiring little more than a bunch of basil, and I realized that restaurants were taking me for a fool, charging $7 or $8 -- at an upscale place as much as $15 -- for a plate of the stuff. I saw a recipe for potato gnocchi in a magazine and discovered that these delectable dumplings, which I had considered the height of cooking complexity, were merely flour, potatoes and salt.

It was a great day when I found out I could make pesto with a $1.50 bunch of basil, but the real coup came when I saw a basil plant on sale for the same $1.50. I blended up months of pesto, plus contributed basil leaves to tomato sauce and whatever else came along, with that buck-fifty. Looking back, it was probably only a matter of time before my interest in food led me to gardening. After many false starts and plants that died way before their time, I got really into growing food items. I packed containers with salad greens and let huge tomato vines adorn the fire escape of my Brooklyn apartment. (My mouth waters when I imagine what I could someday do with a backyard!) In less time than it took me to earn a college degree, I climbed from the ranks of the food helpless to become the kind of person who stores homegrown vegetables in the freezer for winter.

My harvests are modest -- a few tomatoes backed by a great deal of pride--but I have learned a lot, and once I had grown my own, I started looking at food in a new way. The sterile produce aisles with their anonymous bins and occasional sprays of cool mist suddenly seemed more bizarre than enticing. It was hard to picture all of these drab, uniform fruits and vegetables growing in dirt and on trees. And yet, at the same time, my initial instinct was to trust these undoubtedly pesticide-laden items more readily than my own coddled crops. While I unthinkingly downed supermarket produce, I subjected my own harvest to careful scrutiny, picking over each leaf and washing everything obsessively for fear of eating an aphid or something. And in fact, utterly processed, packaged foods continue to seem most trustworthy of all. The less I've had a hand in bringing a food item into existence, the more foolproof and reliable it seems. I guess you could say I am such a dupe of the food industry that I trust it more than myself.

I think many young people share this misguided feeling. A friend told me about bringing neighborhood kids to her community garden in the Bronx and showing them they could pick and eat fresh peas right off the vines. They were horrified and broke into peals of gross-out laughter, screaming, "She ate that from the plant! That's disgusting!" They'd be much more comfortable (although probably not ecstatic about) eating frozen Green Giant peas, which are just green spitballs compared to garden-fresh peas.

I had a similarly revealing experience with my six year-old neighbor. We were planting some seeds together in her small backyard when she turned to me in confusion and asked if we could actually eat these food plants if they touched unsavory dirt. I suppose you could chalk this up to adorable childhood ignorance, but this kid is extremely savvy. She knows every Avril Lavigne lyric, but she doesn't know that vegetables grow in the ground. And how could she, when she only sees vegetables on a plate or in a store? She was very excited when I listed "arugula" among the seed packets I had bought, which I at first took to be a sign of her extraordinary sophistication. The misunderstanding became apparent, however, when she added, "Mmm, I love chocolate arugula!" This poor child thought we could plant rugelach, a pastry.

The situation of our ignorance is deteriorating rapidly -- even at age six, I'd like to think I knew that pastries didn't grow on trees. As each generation gets further from the farm and closer to the strip mall, our dependence on convenient, prepared foods is pushing us deeper into oblivion. Not only do we no longer know how our food is grown, we don't even know what it actually is. (I only recently found out that peanuts are seeds that form underground.) And we don't care. Perhaps we don't have time to care. In the endless hustle of earning money, going to school and whatever else, it's all we can do to microwave a frozen dinner at the end of a hectic day. (Although, we could make a lot of meals in the three hours per day -- on average -- that we currently spend watching TV.) Our society increasingly considers food preparation nothing but an unnecessary hassle. Why bother with one more thing when we already have so much on our plates? As a result, younger generations aren't learning much about food or how to prepare it. And in the post-Home Ec era, it's a little unclear who, if anyone, should be a pupil in the kitchen -- daughters are glad to sever their historical bondage to housework, and sons aren't eager to forsake the video game console for the stovetop.
As many young activists become increasingly aware and concerned about the history behind what they buy, the politics of food are finally being brought to the table. The many students who courageously reject sweatshop-made apparel would probably also object to the horrors of industrial agriculture, but this industry has managed to keep its secrets amazingly well packaged. A T-shirt without a "Made In ____" label would be suspect, but foods can be anonymous and get away with it, perhaps because they seem like they can't possibly have anything to hide. An apple is an apple, right? If it looks good, it is good. The secret behind the success of industrial agriculture and junk foods may be just that: production is focused on making things look good, duping our senses into thinking that these products are wholesome, healthy and harmless.

From factory farms to packaging plants and fast food restaurants, the food industry has connived us into assuming that we should take no part whatsoever in bringing food to our tables -- our only job should be gulping it down. As the farmer and writer Wendell Berry says, "That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so." Nor should we trouble ourselves about what follows the brief romance between food and taste buds. We are expected to think of food only as it enters our mouths, and maybe not even then, since taste is not greatly prioritized either.

In fact, a lot of what we eat tastes terrible, and most of what tastes "good" is just fake -- utterly bland food highlighted by chemical flavor. Take the fast food milkshake, for example, the quintessential great-tasting fast food. A Burger King strawberry shake is not strawberry at all. It actually contains artificial strawberry flavor, a lab creation consisting of 48 different chemicals. (Way to go, science!) All this for a flavor that occurs, in a more complex, less saccharine version, in actual strawberries that grow on real plants in the soil. Artificial flavor is a crucial ingredient in all fast foods and packaged foods (take a look at the ingredients lists) and without it, lemon Jell-O would not taste like lemon, Welch's grape soda would not taste like grapes, and "buttered popcorn" Jelly Bellys would sure as hell not taste like buttered popcorn. (That so-called popcorn you're tasting is methyl-2-peridylketone.)

So if prepared foods are actually bland and nutritionally barren, what do they have going for them? Well, they at least look good, and as Americans have come to accept lack of taste, we rely increasingly on looks to stir our appetites. This has resulted in a kind of hollow food porn, peddled everywhere from Dominoes commercials to Taco Bell drive-thru menu consoles. The pictured food is colorful, flawless, seductive: "Get the door, it's Dominoes!" True, the pizza in the box rarely looks as perfect, but fake foods have hijacked our trust. The uniform, unblemished items now look delicious to us -- more delicious, even, than any foods we flawed humans could make ourselves. (Consider Eddie Murphy's mom's burgers.) The truth is that these sexy foods have the equivalent of a chemical boob job. Artificial colors team up with artificial flavors to make bland goo into "apple pie" or "strawberry filling."

Our instincts to eat tasty and good-looking foods aren't superfluous. We're alive today because at some point our lucky ancestors knew that ugly colors meant foul meat and bad tastes meant poisonous plants. But these days the food industry is fooling our instincts, getting us to eat foods that in the long run endanger us and our world by dressing them up as foods we recognize as good. Americans' unwitting seduction by Big Food has already fattened us up for the kill: a recent study found that 65% of Americans are now overweight, and that number has climbed ten percentage points just in the decade since the fast-food-free-for-all of the 1980s. Only time will tell what other consequences may arise in our bodies or our planet. Perhaps the greatest offense, as far as the health of people and environment is concerned, is the factory farm.
Drive up the 5 freeway from Los Angeles to San Francisco and you will see vast swaths of land divided like lined paper into precise, unending rows. These are the industrial farms where most of our food originates, and although they do look kind of cool driving by, they are a serious hazard to the health and well-being of the soil, air and water, as well as the people who work there. Emerging from the drab suburbs into the open farmlands of the Central Valley can make you breath a sigh a relief -- Ah, there is nature here, after all! -- but in fact, these factory farms are anti-nature: gigantic mono-cropped fields that expel all other life. Pesticides and synthetic fertilizers soak into the land and drift into the air and water, making the five-legged frog, among other aberrations, a tragic reality. The truly frightening thing about these chemicals is that they beget more chemicals. Insect pests and weeds adapt and the chemical-laden soil loses its natural fertility -- which requires upping the ante. More pesticides, more herbicides, more fertilizers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning every year. Most of them are migrant workers who sweat out long and literally backbreaking days picking the fields for pittance pay.

Consideration for how our food is grown is usually presented as a personal choice: healthy-hippie types choose to shop at farmer's markets or consume organic whole foods because they don't want to ingest chemicals, and the rest of us consider the cost and decide we don't mind eating a few pesticides now and then, so long as we can maintain our convenient lifestyle. But our choice of food is also a political one, just like our choice of clothes, for example. The anti-sweatshop movement focuses on the rights of workers (not, say, on sweatshop-made clothes being flimsily constructed or too itchy), but the natural food movement often presents the issue strictly from a taste and consumer health standpoint. Those are important considerations, but what about the migrant farmworkers who pick our food? What about the soil and water contaminated with chemicals? What about the animal habitat that cannot coexist with a factory farm? Our collective choices determine whether small farmers will survive and whether chemical-free farming will succeed. And whether our taste buds will learn the subtle pleasures of real food.

The massive scale of production on factory farms requires an equally massive market, and that means serious shipping, which goes a long way toward explaining all those abominable trucks that clog our highways. A map delineating the roads traveled from food producer to eater would show a mess of long red lines, many of which would be traveled in both directions. Florida orange juice journeys to California. Garlic trucks all the way up from Mexico to New York, even though it grows fine in every region of the United States. Almost 22 percent of our produce actually make the trip from other countries. Despite the comparative advantage myths of free trade economics, this is not based on any orderly logic, but the simple calculation of whether Florida's Natural can ship orange juice to Orange County, California and still make a profit. Certainly the environmental costs are not part of the equation: most of our food travels 1,500 miles on average before it reaches our mouths, requiring insane amounts of fossil fuel

With all that shipping, our produce doesn't exactly reach us at the peak of freshness, and a lot of what you are paying for when you buy food is gas. The fact that is isn't just a heap of mold by the time it reaches us is thanks to wasteful refrigerated shipping, and to the development of new vegetable hybrids designed to withstand the journey -- they taste bland, but they ship great! Europeans have been known to laugh out loud at the hard, flavorless orange balls that we accept as "tomatoes." (They have also been known to chant "Non à McMerde!" at protests.) Hybridization of food plants has brought us such brilliant innovations as iceberg lettuce--it ships, it stores, and it now comprises 73 percent of the American lettuce crop. Oh yeah, and it's completely bland. No wonder people have to slather their salads in ranch dressing.

As food is increasingly provided for us without any input on our part, we lose a lot. Our health seems to be the most obvious casualty, but there are wider consequences. We lose our sense of independence -- How many of us can produce something as simple and crucial as a loaf of bread for ourselves? -- and we lose appreciation for what food actually is: extraordinary combinations of plant and animal products that keep us alive and bring us pleasure. (Can you believe strawberries exist? Way to go, nature!) The more reliant we are on the big growers and food producers, the more ignorant we become, which is why genetically modified foods, for example, were able to slip into our daily meals with little ado. Whether or not the so-called Frankenfoods are dangerous, it is disturbing enough just to not know when we are eating them, which is "practically every day," according to Mark Schapiro in The Nation magazine: "Unless it's duly labeled, chances are anything with processed soy or corn has been genetically modified." That includes my favorite cereal, Crispix, and just about anything else that's processed, or sweetened with corn syrup.

Although it affects our lives more than any other consumer good, we don't know our food very well. It reaches us as inert objects on a plate in a restaurant, in a foil wrapper at a fast food joint or in a heap in the grocery store. It's easy to lose sight of the obvious: food comes from a living thing, plant or animal, although these days a lot of what comprises food also has origins in a lab in Jersey. We also lose appreciation for farmers, who seem to be mere relics of a bygone era when food actually had to be grown and harvested. (The caption of a New Yorker cartoon reads, "What do I care if a bunch of farmers go broke? I buy my food at a grocery store!")

Industrial foods suggest that our dinner can be manufactured like any other product, but the truth is, food will always have to be grown and harvested--at least, any food I would ever want to eat. Too often it is grown with pesticides and harvested by exploited farmworkers, then shipped, processed and packaged to death before it reaches us. Fortunately, however, it's not hard to take food into our own hands. House-burger, anyone?


Emma Pollin is a 23 year-old freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

The summer of �95 was a lonely one for me at Camp Swig, the Jewish camp where I spent six summers growing up. There were only twelve people in my age group that year (there had been over a hundred the previous year) and�horror of horrors! �not one of the twelve was male. We were forced to woo younger guys or scavenge in the reject bin of the older group. Most of my friends from previous summers chose not to join in the song sessions and color wars at Camp Swig that year. Instead, they all went to Israel.

The summer after tenth grade is probably the most popular time for American Jewish kids to go on Israel trip programs. The trips were heartily endorsed by the rabbi of my tiny synagogue in the desert suburb of Riverside, California. Even Camp Swig, which was floundering financially, encouraged us 16-year-olds to skip camp that summer and go on an Israel trip.

	Without any context about the realities of the situation in the Middle East, it's easy for this kind of entitled attachment to Israel to bleed into a sense that others don't have the right to live there.

"We were very, very encouraged to go," says Lisa Arbitman, 23, a teacher in New York City, citing pressure from peers and instructors at her Hebrew High in Scottsdale, AZ. Rachel Posner, 19, now a UCLA student, says everyone from her Jewish youth group in Fremont, CA was expected to go. "It was like, okay, now you all go to Israel. It was just what everybody did." I resisted the hype, mostly because I loved camp obsessively and refused to miss a summer, plus I had been to Israel the previous year with my family. Our trip to Israel was fun, but we also visited Greece, where I ate hundreds of cheese pies made of flaky phyllo dough. Blasphemous as it may sound, the Western Wall just couldn�t compete.

Israel trip programs have been around for over fifty years, but a variety of new trips have recently sprouted and now there are well over 100 programs, some of which send thousands of youths to Israel each year. Each trip fills a specific niche, ranging from yeshiva study to extreme camping. Young Jews can work on a kibbutz, earn college credits, or volunteer for the Civil Guard. Most trips are geared toward high-schoolers, but others cater to college students or recent grads. They range from spiritual explorations to secular tours, but almost every trip stipulates that participants be Jewish; many programs only accept American Jews. And all participants must be young�thirty is the absolute limit.

You might think that teenagers and twenty-somethings would consider religious pilgrimage a stodgy way to spend the summer. But the trips seduce young people by painting the experience as one big pilgrimage party�regardless of how religious you are or how "Jewish" you feel. As the Young Judea program boasts, there is "plenty of time for personal exploration and leisure." Usually the leisure consists of snorkeling, night club jaunts and ample free time spent with other American youths.

The program that truly takes the advertising cake is birthright israel (yes, all lower-case letters, as if such modesty could make up for the presumptuous name). The young program asks prospective participants to "Imagine this�A FREE VACATION, including recreation, touring, and hang out time�" and so far, 28,000 youths have snapped up this irresistible offer. When they say free, they mean it: many programs offer funding of $500-$2,000, but birthright israel actually offers all-expenses paid trips to young Jews�18-26�who have never been on an official "peer group Israel trip" before. I was an econ major, so I happen to know that there ain�t no such thing as a free vacation. The "gift," as the program refers to it, is actually paid for by American Jewish congregations, wealthy individuals and�revealingly�the state of Israel.

Who could turn down a free vacation? Or a chance to escape home for six weeks at the tender age of 16? Posner remembers older peers bragging about how fun the Israel trip was and playfully taunting "Ooh, we went to Israel and you didn�t!�They�d be so bonded. I remember looking forward to that." Says Arbitman, "I guess I expected to have a lot of fun and meet new people. That was about all."

	Who could turn down a free vacation? Or a chance to escape home for six weeks at the tender age of 16? Posner remembers older peers bragging about how fun the Israel trip was and playfully taunting "Ooh, we went to Israel and you didn�t!�They�d be so bonded.

The trips attended by most Camp Swig-ites are full of perks, and according to my friends� reports, gave them plenty of reason to choose Israel over camp. The camp rules were strict: definitely no smoking, drinking, or heavy petting. Curfew was 10:00 p.m. sharp, even for teenagers. But on the legendary Israel trip�which my friends described in hushed tones as if they still might get caught�they were just hitting the streets by 10:00 and smoking was the least of their allowable vices. My first boyfriend lost his virginity on the Israel trip. Clearly, in the words of my friends, this was the Promised Land.

The aim of these programs is no secret: they want young Jews to explore the homeland in a fun atmosphere, so that they will have a meaningful experience and become intimately attached to Judaism and Israel. Paul Reichenbach, who coordinates Israel trips for NFTY (the North American Federation of Temple Youth), says kids should return home feeling "personally connected to and invested in Israel and the Jewish people." The Livnot U�Lehibanot program seeks youngsters who are "looking to get in touch with their Jewish roots while connecting to the land of Israel." And birthright israel "believes in promoting Jewish peoplehood and Jewish renaissance with NO STRINGS ATTACHED." Which I guess means, you can enjoy a sunny Jewish vacation and we won�t evangelize. But there are definitely strings attached.

After returning from Israel trips, I have heard many friends give new meaning to the words of Elie Wiesel: "The fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives within me." Israel trips encourage an unthinking Israelophilia in young American Jews. When 16-year olds become attached to Israel, they may not distinguish between falafels, disco boats, their new American friends, cute soldiers, green lines, Likud, Labor and illegal settlements. They just love everything about Israel, Tzahal and all..

That enthusiasm cannot avoid political undertones. Most people I talked to thought nothing of the incongruous mix of recreational and politically-charged activities on their trips. "It was six weeks, typical tourist trip�slept at youth hostels, visited the Western Wall, stayed with the army for a week," Posner says casually. Israel trips bait youngsters with their recreational vacations, then invest them with some very political sentiments. Young Jews are exposed to the joys of the Jewish state, but not the perils of its land disputes�even the army becomes just a campy way to spend a week. The trips instill a simple adoration for Israel that makes the answers to any political questions predetermined. Posner told me that she wasn�t involved with Israeli politics, but then added, "Of course whenever there�s a pro-Israel rally or anything on [the UCLA] campus, I�ll be there to support Israel."

Most programs, like birthright israel and NFTY which are geared toward Reform Jews, work this magic subtly. However, even the trips that advertise apolitically can be disturbingly militaristic, which accurately reflects the American relationship with Israel in general. NFTY, and other similar trips, include an elective week when participants can choose from options like backpacking, a kibbutz stay, tours focused on art or politics�or boot camp with the Israeli army. Boot camp is a very popular option. Other trips are explicit about their political goals. For example, successful candidates for a program called Project SSNAP "must show�a dedication to the cause and a commitment to devoting time and energy organizing pro-Israel programs on campus." The trip includes meeting with soldiers and even volunteering for the Israeli Defense Force.

American Jewish youths learn from Israel trips that the land is uniquely endowed to them. If they weren�t dreadfully important to Israel, why would they be inundated with entreaties to come visit? The trips emphasize the idea that Jerusalem can dwell within the hearts of all Jews, and that one need not actually live in Israel to be connected to it. Without any context about the realities of the situation in the Middle East, it's easy for this kind of entitled attachment to Israel to bleed into a sense that others don't have the right to live there.

The fact that a few young American Jews really like Israel would seem unimportant�were it not for the fact that the US gives one-third of its entire aid budget to Israel. A country the size of New Jersey, Israel will receive approximately $3 billion from American coffers this year, much of it earmarked for buying American weapons. Sierra Leone, the war-torn poorest nation in the world, got only $9.50 per person in 2000 aid, while generally well-fed Israelis get nearly $470 per capita every year.
Of course Israel trips are not "evil Zionist camps" as one non-Jewish friend referred to them. They don�t viciously conspire to win the hearts of American Jews just so that the IDF can get ample US funding. The programs truly seem to have the best interests of young people in mind. Trip organizers have created a beautiful system: they offer youngsters good, clean fun and simultaneously do the Jewish people a good turn by winning new devotees for Judaism and the state of Israel. "Unlike in past generations, for most American kids today, being Jewish is a choice that they have," says Reichenbach of NFTY. "We hope that while being in Israel, instead of being passive observers, the epic journey of the Jewish people is their journey."

The Israeli government, which provides funding for trips like birthright israel, knows where its interests lie. It recognizes that Jewish supremacy in Israel is highly dependent on the ideological support of American Jews and the $3 billion sponsorship of the US government. And what better way to buy the loyalty of the younger generation of Jewish Americans than by making them feel that they themselves are Israeli, their souls married to their homeland even if their bodies are divorced from it. (Despite their deeply felt connections, very few trip alumni choose to move to the Promised Land.)

	The Israeli government, which provides funding for trips like birthright israel, knows where its interests lie. It recognizes that Jewish supremacy in Israel is highly dependent on the ideological support of American Jews and the $3 billion sponsorship of the US government.

Israel trips breed simplistic love for Israel with serious consequences, but this does not have to be the case. On the contrary, exposing young people to new parts of the world is a valuable project. Jewish teenagers are used to being a religious minority in the United States, so discovering a homeland so richly steeped in their culture and history produces a glorious shock of recognition. David Knipp, a twenty-year old college student in Texas, thinks his Israel trip was "the best experience I�ve ever had. It was like connecting to a past life." How can an Israel trip be such a positive experience with such negative consequences?

Danielle, 20, explained this perfectly: "My main criticism of my trip is that it gave us this attachment without giving us the knowledge to analyze political conflict with understanding for all individuals involved�I believe this is what breeds hatred between Arabs and Jews: strong attachments to religion and culture with little knowledge." Being of Iranian-Jewish descent herself, and being a student at UC Berkeley, where tensions between Arab and Jewish students are reaching a boil, Danielle has a uniquely insightful perspective and she wasn�t fooled by the officially apolitical slant of her trip. "The goal of the trip," she asserts, "was to rally support in the US for Israel through us."

I asked Reichenbach of NFTY what he thought of Danielle�s assessment�that Israel trips make kids fall in love with Israel without understanding its politics. "That�s probably a realistic appraisal," he replied. Most trip-goers come in with little background knowledge, and "you can�t throw too much heavy-duty political stuff at them. Most of what we do is about loving Israel and enjoying Israel; it doesn�t allow for sinking your teeth into the political situation."

Fortunately, a few Israel programs are jumping the Israelophilia bandwagon by creating trips that focus on education, confronting the diversity of Israel and its complex politics. While Zionist-oriented trips tend to breed Zionists, people who go on multicultural, educational trips develop a broader perspective. Those I spoke to described meeting and even travelling with Arab-Israeli teenagers and engaging in fiery but civil and productive debates about Israel�s future. "I would never have gone on a yea-Jewish-homeland trip," says Sarah Margon, a twenty-five year old living in Washington, D.C. Her small travel group, part of an Interlocken program, included Christians, Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis. "There was a lot of open discussion and you were encouraged to learn from the world around you," says Margon.

The Bronfman Youth Fellowship trip (funded the Bronfman media tycoon family) is also unusually progressive and its focus is academic. The Fellowship�s first objective is "to deal with the challenges of a diverse community. This is done through study, through discussion�without a priori assumptions." David Schlitt, 20, a Columbia University student who attended the trip three years ago described learning about US-Israel relations and meeting with Arab students from the organization Seeds of Peace. "You had to be open-minded for this trip," he says.

Most Israel program itineraries stick to predominantly Jewish areas without exception. They cite safety reasons�a valid concern�but trip-goers didn�t think safety was the only reason; venturing out of would disrupt the Disneyland atmosphere of the trip. As Arbitman recalls, "It just feels like they keep you in a bubble." But alternative programs like Bronfman and Interlocken make a point of bringing kids to Arab-Israeli towns and staying with Arab families.

Mainstream trip-goers come home feeling "bonded" with Israel, but they are not particularly worried about its violent conflict. After all, in the sanitized Israel of their trip, conflict was obscured from view by all the sunshine and Arabs on either side of the border were invisible. I don�t remember much from my family trip to Israel, but I will never forget that our family friends, two clean-cut brothers who took us to the Tel Aviv Hard Rock Cafe, were escorting us everywhere with Uzis tucked in their pants. The moment I found out they were armed, it hit me that civilian life in Israel was quite a departure from the carefree life of a middle-class American teenager.

Knipp believes that " conflict is inevitable." Posner is "not really worried." Well, that�s fine to say from your California suburban wonderland, but what does it mean for the average Israeli or Palestinian who has to live with the ever-escalating threat of violence? As long as the concept of Israel lives in their hearts rather than their minds�and as long as it is physically available when they choose to visit�American youths do not need to think or care about Israel, even if they love it.

Needless to say, this is dangerous for both Jews and Arabs. While there is nothing wrong with introducing young Jews to their homeland, the trips nurture simple love for Israel without examining the web of issues that surround its existence. They encourage blind emotion, which, as Danielle pointed out, works like kerosene on the conflict. Blissful ignorance isn�t doing American kids any favors either; they are being sold the false promise of a Jewish Eden with no Tree of Knowledge. And they also miss camp.

Emma Pollin is a 23 year-old freelance writer living in Brooklyn.