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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, rmwj@SOONERNET.COM
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food buyer's guide to farm friendly food
  • Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 20:46:29 -0700

Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food buyer's guide to farm friendly food
By Joel Salatin

A review by Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Cooperative

If I had a million dollars, I think I would spend a substantial amount of it
to buy copies of Joel Salatin's new book, "Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food
buyer's guide to farm friendly food", and give them away.

I spend a lot of my creative time trying to figure out ways to encourage
people to buy local foods, specifically in our case, Oklahoma foods. It's a
two-sided process. You have to talk with the producers, and help them
understand how city people think about local food and what the farmer needs
to do to help people buy their locally produced foods. You have to talk with
the customers, so that they understand the opportunities, and the
limitations, of the local food market as it presently is. Before both you
have to dangle bundles of carrots, "just keep moving in this direction, it's
not far, we'll get there, it will be great when we do get there", and so on
and so forth in a thousand different iterations just in the past 12 months
since we put up our Oklahoma Food Cooperative shingle and got into the local
food marketplace bidness.

Neither farmer nor customer really understands the other at this stage in our
development, some have more clues than others, but even after 12 months of
work, there is a lot of producer and customer education that needs to be done.

Enter Joel Salatin, one of America's most successful direct farm to customer
producers.

He has written a book about local food that is filled with passion and love.
I have met him a couple of times, he spoke at a pasture meeting here in
Oklahoma City and we were both at Terra Madre 2004 in Turin. But I can't say
as how I have sat down and talked with him for any particular length of time,
the way you do when you really get to know someone. Well, having read this
book, I feel like I know him much better. He writes with a spirit of
authenticity that is almost startling to behold in an era when the 30 second
sound byte is the attention span of most folks.

He covers both sides of the local food equation in his book. He speaks to
farmers and customers, and by reading what he says, each side can learn about
the other. If customers want to understand local food from a farmer's
perspective, they can read what Joel says to the farmers. Ditto for farmers
trying to grok how to sell directly to the public, they need to know about
customers and so they can read what Joel says to the customers. He tells
city people how they can tell if food is farm friendly, what to look for when
they visit a farm, what questions to ask. He tells farmers how they should
talk to customers, and calls both customers and farmers to a culture of
respect for each other.

His writing is very readable, the book is not a long polemic, but rather more
like an extended conversation. He tells a lot of funny anecdotes, although
some of them are kind of "funny-sad", especially when he talks about some of
his interactions with government regulatory agencies. "Folks, I am not making
this up." You don't have to be a rocket scientist or an organic chemist to
understand what he is saying.

Both farmers and customers need a timely reminder of the importance of what
we do, and in that regard this little book could fairly be compared to Thomas
Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense, which as much as anything else laid the
philosophical and political foundation for the American Revolution.. Joel
lays it all out, he names names, and does not pull any punches. He calls
things what they are, he is plain spoken, as perhaps only country people can
be. The book is well organized. It covers GMO's, nutrition, health, food
safety, cheap food, small versus large, heritage crops, heritage breeds,
heritage values, east versus west, globalization, food security,
decentralism, bioregionalism, government regulations, "deep food" philosophy.

The book ends with a stirring call to action, and I would like to quote
extensively from it. Joel Salatin writes to us:

"Every day you get to nudge our world either toward or away from farm
friendly food. Do not go into a guilt-induced depression over the magnitude
of the task. Do not be discouraged over its enormity. You are not
responsible for fixing it all. I think the central question each of us needs
to ask ourselves at the end of the day is this: "Today, which food system
advanced because of me -- farm friendly food or industrial food? , , ,

"My goal for each of us would be that we would at least think, at least break
stride, before patronizing the industrial fare. When we think about the
environment, the plight of plants and animals, the nutrition of our families,
we have a responsibility to act in accordance with some moral and ethical
discernment. None of us will ever be 100% consistent. We we can aspire to be
50%. Or 60%. Every day thousands of farmers across this land go against
their peers, the academic institutions, the farm organizations that receive
the media spotlight, and a legion of bureaucrats to produce and process farm
friendly food. This food keeps dollars turning in local communities. This
food maintains green spaces wthout government programs and expensive
taxpayer-purchased development rights or easements. This food maintains clean
water and fresh air for all of us to enjoy. This food protects our
watersheds, viewscapes, and natural resources."

"Farm friendly food respects the wisdom of the Creator's DNA, honors the
information in the mind of an earthworm, and appreciates the beauty of hogs
in their rooting heaven. This food values bioregions, social structure, and
wildness. It ponders the environmental and moral footprint of every decision,
every activity, every marketing model. You, as a food buyer, have the
distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your
children will inherit. Will it be a world of soylent green, of cloned
cookie-cutter sameness? Or will it be a world resplendent with variety, a
veritable panoply of heritage diversity? Will it be a world of rural
landscapes shaped by global positioning satellite-steered machines
manipulated from a robotic computer console half a continent away? Or will
it be a rural landscape blooming with diversity, brimming with dancing
children, and blossoming with pasture flowers?"

"You don't need to wait until Congress is in session to impact what you eat
for dinner tonight. You don't need to wait until the next Farm Bill to voice
your concerns about the USDA budget. You don't need to picket the next World
Trade Organization talks in order to affect who wins and loses in this great
quest for the global food dollar."

"Right here, right now, you can do something. You can vote with your food
dollar. You can go to a farmer's market. You can contact your state's
alternative farming association. You can pick a day next week to fix an
entire meal from scratch from something local. . . but just like any action,
the most critical thing is that you do something. Today. At least this week.
. . a whole world, a wonder world, exists outside of Wal Mart. And although
it's not a sin to go there, it may be a sin to go frequently."

"If you are a person of conviction, a person of action, you will begin wtih
one step, a second step, then a third. New habits are formed one tiny change
at a time. A year from now you'll look back and wonder how you ever tolerated
that factory fare. . . You'll be emotionally and spiritually uplifted,
knowing your food buying has encouraged farm friendly food." . . .

"To all caring food buyers, I honor you. To all farm friendly food
producers, I honor you. We must be committed, focused, and persistent if we
are to see farm friendly food triumph. It can. It's up to us. Let's keep on
keeping on."

The book is available as individual copies for $14 from Acres USA at:

http://www.acresusa.com/books/closeup.asp?prodid=1249&catid=18&pcid=2

My recommendation: buy them by the case of 44 for $7 each ($308 for the
case, includes shipping):

http://www.acresusa.com/books/closeup.asp?prodid=1250&catid=18&pcid=2

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Cooperative
www.oklahomafood.org







  • [Livingontheland] Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food buyer's guide to farm friendly food, Tradingpost, 11/14/2004

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