permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

US Recall News
Interview with Joel Salatin
November 26, 2009
http://www.usrecallnews.com/2009/11/interview-with-joel-salatin.html
Q.
Do you think there are more cases of food-borne illnesses per-capita 
these days, or are we just hearing about more of them due to the media 
and better reporting by government agencies?
A.
    I believe we’re having far more per capita. While it’s true we’ve 
always had food issues, from botulism poisoning to undulant fever, the 
historic figures are very, very low. If you add obesity and Type II 
diabetes into the mix – in a way, they are pathogenically caused as well 
because the food is not real food; it’s pseudo food. Amazingly, we’ve 
become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew 
safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe. The fact that we 
have an entirely new lexicon of salmonella, listeria, bovine spongiform 
encephalopathy, campylobacter, E. coli, etc. speaks to the new 
generation and penetration of the current food borne pathogen situation. 
Furthermore, it’s hard to empirically measure secondary results of 
tainted food, like the things that occur when people eat genetically 
modified organisms, irradiated foods, or pasteurized milk. Some of these 
things take a while to develop into problems, just like infertile frogs, 
three-legged salamanders, and crippled eagles did not happen immediately 
when DDT was developed. The long lag between cause and effect is hard to 
measure, and very hard to quantify in today’s fast-paced data and news 
system.
Q.
Do you see a legitimate, defensible role for state and federal 
government agencies to play in protecting American consumers from 
food-borne illnesses? If so, what would that be?
A.
    No. This side of eternity, a perfect system does not exist. To 
assume that government agents are more trustworthy than business, or 
journalists, or farmers, is inherently ridiculous. Unscrupulous people 
exist in all vocations. That is why we have third-party independent 
accreditation that works fairly well in many areas, from certified 
General Motors mechanics to schools to Triple A to Underwriters 
Laboratories. Every time the government gets involved with these things, 
rather than being voluntary, they move into the realm of force, and that 
completely changes the dynamics. When the Sheriff shows up with an 
arrest warrant and a gun, that’s a very different dynamic than Triple A 
sending me a letter telling me they will drop my two star hotel status 
because their inspection found wrinkled sheets in Room 129. And that 
extra force allows the independent certification status to assume 
inordinate power, which ultimately attracts more unseemly characters to 
its model – both the regulators and the regulated. It all boils down to 
trust. Indeed, on my end I see incredible abuses from regulators, 
especially toward small operators. When people say we just need to 
create more honesty in the government program, they are speaking from 
incredible naïveté, in my opinion. We have more dirty food, more 
centralized mega-processing facilities, and less nutrition now than we 
did in 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt railed against the packing industry 
exposed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Both Sinclair, and to a great 
extent Roosevelt, wanted much bigger government and far more intrusion 
into the marketplace. Within six months after The Jungle hit America’s 
shelves, meat sales dropped nearly 50 percent. Rather than waiting for 
this marketplace spanking to have its effect, Roosevelt and the industry 
created the Food Safety and Inspection Service. That organization and 
the incredible power it wields have systematically banished the embedded 
butcher, baker, and candlestick maker from America’s villages. We’ve had 
three overhauls of the system: 1947, 1967, and 2000 – and each time, 
within 18 months, the US lost half of its smaller abattoirs. People must 
realize that giving that power to the government is inherently flawed 
because it will inevitably attract abuses that more gentle, voluntary, 
privately-operated systems do not.
Q.
Is there another country in the world that has a safer, more equitable 
food production system that allows for corporate agribusiness to thrive 
without putting small farmers out of business and without endangering 
consumers? If so, what can we learn from them?
A.
    My sense is that most developing countries have far more food 
freedom. Whether it’s safer or not, I don’t know. But it’s certainly no 
worse. The point is that you can’t define safety necessarily. I consider 
pastured livestock and poultry safe; the poultry industry considers me a 
bioterrorist because the Red-winged Blackbirds commiserate with my 
chickens and will transport their diseases to the since-based, 
environmentally- controlled Tyson chicken houses, endangering the entire 
planet’s food system. We’re seeing studies coming out of land grant 
colleges now saying that meat laced with antibiotic residues due to 
subtherapeutic antibiotic feeding in Concentrated Animal Feeding 
Operations is safer for consumers than meat carrying no drug residues. 
The fact is that those of us promoting a heritage-based food system are 
under assault by the industrial-governmental fraternity just as surely 
as Native Americans were nearly annihilated by government policy in 
earlier times. Largely for the same reasons. They threatened the 
American way of life (read Wall Street there) or they jeopardized decent 
western contrivances like Roberts Rules of Order and cobblestone 
streets. Read what the founders of our country said about the Naive 
American – “just barbarians”. By whose standard? And read what the 
government-industrial food complex says about heritage food – it 
endangers the world food supply because it’s not science-based; it plays 
to ignorant and duplicitous consumers; it’s a waste of land because we 
can’t afford these low production numbers, etc.

    Historically, respecting an indigenous view while allowing 
techno-innovation has not been possible. The technology conquers and 
subjugates the heritage-based. The European Union is attacking 
heritage-based Polish sausage and Swiss artisanal cheese with a passion. 
My friends in China tell me that a thriving local food system exists 
there that would put America to shame. And people not far removed from 
the land know the difference between the good local stuff and the junk. 
They export the junk and eat the good stuff themselves. Oh that Americas 
would have such discernment.
Q.
What would a “sane” Food Bill look like to you? Or would there even be one?
A.
    We wouldn’t even have a Food Bill if I were in charge. The first 
response to that is: “But then the big corporations would just take over 
and it would be worse than today. After all, the free market is why 
we’re in the mess we’re in.” On the contrary, the U.S. has not had 
anything resembling a free market for well over a century. You could 
argue that ever since that big-governmenter Abraham Lincoln created the 
US Department of Agriculture, we’ve had inappropriate government agents 
meddling in the food system. The fact is that the terrible food things 
that have been developed have come at the financing, either directly or 
through research, of the government. Why does Monsanto get to park their 
recruitment bus on the campus of Virginia Tech for several days each 
year – for free? I personally have had numerous professors from Virginia 
Tech visit our farm and express great interest in researching some of 
our environmentally-friendly practices, but lament that they can only 
get seed funding from multi-national corporations so they can’t do this 
kind of research. Again, the framers of the Constitution very carefully 
spelled out the duties of the government, and they were extremely 
minimal. The reason was that as soon as an area of the culture comes 
under the authority of the government, that area quickly develops 
cronyism, a big business agenda, and lack of respect for dissenters, 
which is now what the local food movement represents. I would call it a 
freedom of food choice movement.

    In my book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, I quote at length 
from the written testimony of government food police who make no secret 
that they believe consumers cannot be trusted to make their food 
decisions. If choosing how to feed my internal three-trillion member 
bacterial community that is responsible for my health and energy doesn’t 
represent the most basic Malthusian desire for personal autonomy, I 
don’t know what does. The Constitution guarantees the Right of Contract, 
and yet the food police routinely waltz between the farmer and consumer, 
waving thousands of pages of regulations, and bringing along agents 
carrying big badges and sidearms to interfere with the right of 
contract. If we truly allowed unfettered right of contract, the 
entrepreneurial explosion of creative heritage-based food offered to the 
local marketplace would topple America’s industrial food complex.

    The only reason America’s food is as industrial and non-local as it 
is, is because government force encourages such a system. Absent that 
meddling, thousands and thousands of local food entrepreneurs would spin 
circles around the subsidized, corporate-welfared food system.
Q.
Why don’t small farmers band together to lobby Washington? Could the 
combined power of thousands of small farmers compete with the 
centralized power of a few corporate interests?
A.
    Lobbying takes time. Lots of time. And numbers. And money. I’ve 
been trying all my life to encourage this, but like everyone else, I 
don’t have the time, money, or numbers to get it done. And too many 
small farmers still believe the government is a sugar daddy. So more 
than half the potential supporters are lobbying to get subsidies for 
small farmers instead of big farmers. Why don’t we forget about 
subsidies? Period. But we’ve raised a generation acculturated to believe 
government candy is free, and justified. And then certified organics 
also split up the small farmer group. That probably more than anything 
splintered what could have been a significant block. Now much of the 
time and energy that could be devoted to just creating market freedom 
are being siphoned off in suits and protests against industrial 
organics. We just still have way too many people who trust the 
government and think business is inherently evil.
Q.
Are house bills H.R. 875 (NAIS) and H.R. 759 (FDA Globalization Act) 
still a threat to small farmers and sustenance farmers or are people 
overreacting?
A.
    First, let me be clear that the industrial food agenda, along with 
its complicit government fraternity, is evil. These folks lie, steal, 
cheat, kill, whatever. It’s an evil agenda, with evil planners, evil 
strategists, and evil execution. Certainly some sincere-minded and 
honest folks are caught up in it, but it behooves us to appreciate the 
evil ambition of these people. When Monsanto purposely used geriatric 
rats in their GMO feeding trials for the FDA, or cleverly falsified data 
to receive rBGH approval and infected and afflicted hundreds of 
thousands of dairy cows with mastitis, and then used crooked judges to 
agree that placing rBGH-free on milk labels on artisanal milk actually 
harmed consumers – that bespeaks an evil, deceptive company and agenda. 
And the rest of their cohorts are just like them. So nobody should think 
that these outfits have a benign, population-friendly agenda. And nobody 
should underestimate their connivances to advance their agenda.

    That said, here’s my rule for legislation: if Monsanto is for it, 
I’m against it. If Monsanto is against it, I’m for it. Ditto large meat 
packers, the USDA, etc. A person is known by the company he keeps. These 
outfits aren’t Jesus spending time with sinners to bring them to 
repentance. They are Devils trying to dupe and destroy ecological, 
economic, and social wholesomeness. This test for legislation can save 
you lots of time and consternation trying to figure out all the details. 
I don’t have enough to time to read it all or understand the legalese. I 
listen to people I trust and assume the enemy hasn’t suddenly converted.

    Thanks for asking these questions, and I hope my answers aren’t too 
rambling, but in today’s world, you can’t take these positions without 
some fleshing out and context.

    Happy Thanksgiving.
    Best regards,

    Joel Salatin
    Polyface Farm