Joel F. Salatin (born February 24, 1957) is an American farmer, lecturer, and author whose books include Folks, This Ain't Normal; You Can Farm; and Salad Bar Beef.
If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees.
I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.
The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?
You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.
It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.
Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round
Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.
I think it's one of the most important battles for consumers to fight: the right to know what's in their food, and how it was grown.
I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.
Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?
In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.
A culture that just views a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, and can be manipulated by whatever creative design humans can foist upon that critter, will probably view individuals within its community and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling-type mentality.
We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure.
How dare you treat your soil like dirt!
If it doesn't rot, it's not real food.
The cycle of life is death, decomposition and regeneration, and a person who wants to stop killing animals is actually anti-life because it's only in death that life can be regenerated.
The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.
Everything I want to do is Illegal.