Joel Salatin on the “Local Food Tsunami” and More from this Real Food Rock Star

Since I didn't grow up on a farm like Kent did, and instead was a “townie”, I found this interview about basic sustainable farming methods to be crazy interesting, even though I've heard Joel Salatin speak before.  After watching it again to pull out the quotes below, I'll tell you what, Joel Salatin is now even more of a rock star in my world.  He begins by explaining what the role of an herbivore is in the big picture, as well as the role of the bird that follows along behind, and why, when all of this is done correctly, it forms a perfect system.  Big surprise!  God's way, the natural way, is best once again.

“A carefully choreographed ballet of leader-follower and wonderful symbiosis.”

He talks about the “local food tsunami” and says,

It's really weird to be the ugly step-child for all those early years and then you wake up one day and you're Cinderella.  To be sure, we haven't won this by any means, but it's really amazing to see this.

I pulled out more quotes…

The fact is, you can't divorce yourself as profoundly as our culture has divorced itself from a visceral relationship with food and still have food with integrity.

Another one:

We live in a culture that has decided that it's perfectly safe to feed your kids Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew, but it's not safe to eat raw milk, compost grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda's pickles.  I'm saying that you and I should have the freedom to opt out of government approved things.  Right now there's a tremendous effort to demonize, marginalize or even criminalize these historic heritage foods that have nourished us for a lot longer than industrialized foods have been around.

One more:

Our food police have confused sterile with safe.  And we are not sterile.  As Mark McAfee, of Organic Pastures raw milk in California, says, we are actually ‘bacteriosapiens', we are surrounded inside and out by a world of floating beings, and so it's not about sterilizing us, it's about creating a platform, a terrain that allows the good bugs to beat the bad bugs, that's what it's all about.

Thank you Delainna, who works for the PBS station who interviewed Joel Salatin, for sharing this with us!  Watch the entire interview here:

• Buy Joel Salatin books here!
• “Life is risky, you can die from it!  Ultimately you and I should get to choose our risk.” – That's my fav Joel Salatin quote.  In this post, Illegal Everything – Who Decides What You Eat?, you can see him speak in another great video.
• “We’ve been snookered!” – More on Joel Salatin's book, “Folks, This Ain't Normal!”
• Joel was in this movie, Food, Inc.
• Joel Salatin and the Perfect Farm Bill: Eliminate the USDA {Also: How Much Crunchy Liberals and Conservative Christians Have in Common}