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We have featured ‘heretic‘ /’lunatic’ farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms here on the Sustainable Traditions blogazine from the very beginning because of his fervent call to return to an agriculture that mimics the inherent harmony of GOD’s creation- an agriculture that heals the land, the animals and the people- an agriculture that works through the means of humility, constant inquiry and appropriate technology.
Joel is a full-time farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a widespread speaker, and the author of seven books, including ‘Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front‘ and his latest, ‘The Sheer Ecstasy of Being A Lunatic Farmer‘. He has been featured in the movies Food Inc. and FRESH…I could go on and on.
If you’re in our neck of the woods (here in the Lynchburg/Bedford, Virginia area) come hear Joel Salatin speak at Lynchburg College on (this) Monday, February 14. From the Lynchburg College website:
“Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who was featured in the national bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, will give two lectures, Monday, Feb. 14, in Memorial Ballroom, Hall Campus Center. Salatin will deliver the Senior Symposium lecture on “Dancing with Dinner” at noon and give a Science Gang talk at 4:30 p.m. on “Everything I Want To Do is Illegal.” Both talks are open to the public but the noon lecture has limited seating. Polyface Farms is a multi-generational, pasture-based, local-market farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey, and forestry products. Salatin, 53, is the author of six books on sustainable farming. Polyface Inc. has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Gourmet, and countless other radio, television, and print media. Profiled on the Lives of the 21st Century series with Peter Jennings on ABC World News, his after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date. In “Dancing with Dinner,” Salatin describes how industrial food is aesthetically and aromatically unpleasant from production to supermarket. Although eating is arguably the most intimate thing humans do, during the last few decades Americans have lost their dinner dance partner. Culinary skills and local food connections have been replaced with “No Trespassing” signs, bureaucratic paperwork, unpronounceable labels, bar codes, and beeping cash registers. The soul-satisfying act of eating is now a sterile, manufactured to-do item consumed on the run. In “Everything I Want To Do is Illegal,” Salatin says the single biggest impediment to eating healthier is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models that end up wiping out appropriate-scaled local food systems. A call for guerrilla marketing, food choice freedom legislation, and empirical pathogen thresholds offers solutions to these bureaucratic hurdles.”If you are not in the Lynchburg regional area, don’t fret- you can catch one of Joel’s talks at any number of venues and events around the country. If you are coming -hope to see you there, I’m the guy with the beard (I plan on going to the 4:30 talk)- and make sure to come early- parking is limited.