You probably won’t find Joel Salatin’s unconventional wisdom on the steps of the White House.
It’s most likely in your kitchen tucked between your everyday household gadgets.
In the societal trend toward a healthier eating consciousness, Salatin says it’s better to transcend the fads with sustainable grassroots food activism at the individual level.
“And that, may I say, is exactly why I’m all about really empowering localities and households rather than marching on Washington, D.C.,” said Salatin, a self-described lunatic farmer, during a media conference call from his family farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “I’d love to have a president who gets it as much as anybody. But ultimately, that can change with the whims of anything, just like when Reagan ripped off the solar panels that Jimmy Carter put on the White House. That is why this has to be from the bottom up, where individuals build a relationship with their farmer.”
The famous farmer and real food advocate will be the featured speaker during the annual Kirkland Health Fair on July 23 at Parkplace Center. He will be at the event signing books, followed by a public lecture at 5:30 p.m. at the Kirkland Performance Center, “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.”
Salatin’s farm, Polyface, Inc. (“The Farm of Many Faces”) represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis and even achieved iconic status as the grass farm featured in the New York Times bestseller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” by food writer guru Michael Pollan.
The farm services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales with salad bar, beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products.
For individuals, this so-called food movement starts in their own kitchen, says Salatin, 54.
“The most subversive and direct action you can take in our culture right now against the evil, multi-national corporations … is to rediscover your own kitchen and opt out of the entire processed food system,” he said.
Instead of going to Disneyland, “take that money and buy local, buy cool kitchen gadgets, whether it’s a food dehydrator or a Cuisinart or a slow cooker,” he said, noting he has many customers who buy his “pork fat for pennies” and make good lard in their slow cookers while they’re at work.
Process food yourself, get your kids involved and turn your home back into the center of society, says Salatin.
“If we would lead by example and be a shining light in our own neighborhoods – a beacon of autonomy and independence and opt out of this industrial food system in our own households – it will permeate across the cul de sac, across the street, down the road and it will be a power that is beyond what you can imagine,” he added.
But local government also plays an important role in creating a healthy food system. Salatin offered five things localities should do to work towards that end:
1. A locality should make sure that all of its institutional purchases on any publicly-funded meals, including school meals, are local food.
When a city council, for example, caters a meeting, make sure the food is from a local source.
He noted one locality he ran into that ran a campaign where officials bought beef from a local grass-fed producer. They sold the top end of the animal to people in the community, which financed the ground beef used for the school’s food lunch program.
“(They) were able to self-finance simply by switching money from one place to patronize a local source to finance ground beef that’s $1 a pound more than what they were getting from the institutional sources,” he said. “If every locality would really go out of its way to say we’re going to buy local, it would just be huge.”
2. Create local food ordinances.
He notes three towns in Maine that recently adopted the Local Food and Self Governance Ordinance, which allows municipalities to determine food and farming policies locally.
These sorts of ordinances put localities in charge of its own food policy, “rather than just bowing continually to the federal food police that don’t want you to be able to sell a pound cake to your neighbor or make quiche in an un-inspected kitchen and sell it to your friends,” says Salatin. “And what this is is ultimately a food choice revolution and that would do more to reduce the cost of local food to make it equitable for all people than any single thing that we could possibly do.”
3. Eliminate all subsidies.
“And when I say all, I mean all – all subsidies to build ethanol plants, all subsidies to turn chicken manure into biodiesel, all subsidies to grow corn, all subsidies to grow cotton – all subsidies period,” he said.
4. Edible landscapes.
Cities should encourage edible landscapes, from plants to animals. With anti-chicken or anti-domestic livestock ordinances, many cities have a “tremendous anti-agrarian mindset,” he said. “Cities and localities need to be very aggressive about creating a friendly, encouraging environment for in-city farming.”
5. Season extensions to localize out-of-season production.
Salatin threw in one more local solution for good measure: reduce all taxes.
This would allow families to keep one wage earner at home to take care of livestock, can, process and fix all the meals to “truly extricate and free itself from the industrial food system,” he added.
