Was the Egg That was Laid on Western Piedmont Organic?

We attended one of Western Piedmont's presentations in its Fall Speakers Forum called “Food for Thought: Reinventing Our Food System for a Healthier World.” Joel Salatin was presented as a celebrity already featured on Peter Jennings, the National Geographic and the Smithsonian Magazine among other publications. His family farm, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, named “Polyface, Inc.” services more than 1500 families, 10 retail outlets, and 30 restaurants. We were looking forward to his discussion.

It wasn’t a total disappointment. Salatin made a few positive suggestions. He is a firm believer in small farms, even gardens and small chicken yards. He understands problems inherent in industrial food production, highly-processed food, and national and state governmental regulation of those industries. He also remarked about the absurdity of having some 50 golf courses in the Phoenix area, playfully visualizing them growing useful food. He even challenged Western Piedmont College to plant nut-bearing and fruit trees and vegetables over much of its campus. "Students could snack on healthy food as they walk between classes." (Applause!) He pointed out how many of the problems we have in our country today concerning our food are traceable to four main points:
1) Centralization - huge farms and livestock houses that are vulnerable to mass infection,
2) Transport - Too much of our food is not locally grown and prepared. Average food, Salatin says, travels 1,500 miles.
3) Industrial processing - one fast-food burger can contain meat from 1,500 cows.
4) Emphasizing the treatment of disease with medicine instead of helping the animals and their farms be healthy places.

Sounds pretty good. And that’s the sad part. Almost all of the rest of the presentation by Salatin was the testimony of a born-again libertarian. Not only did he testify, but he whined, and screamed and played-dumb-on-purpose. He ranted about the “food police” . He said the government was “stupid”, “incompetent”, “won’t do anything”, “hates people”, and has allied itself with the corporate farms. His reasoning was often bizarre, beginning with a plausible sounding example then using a number of different “causes” to arrive at the same “effect”. He urged people not to vaccinate their children against H1N1 flu, or for any other reason, and complained that the problems we face with our “industrialized food” is an outgrowth of the “War on Drugs”. What I heard was an involved attack on government for doing shoddy inspections, but also being too intrusive - and rather than suggesting improvements, he seemed to be calling for a total abolition of government involvment in anything related to food. Let the farmers control themselves. He gave us a lot of facts. I haven't (and don't intend to) check any of them but I do know that Louis Pasteur did not die in 1926, as Salatin said. He also said that our problems were caused because our industrialized food production process was out of control and protected by government. His approach was to get rid of government or to “ignore it”. He said that if you want to raise chickens, and your property restrictions or local laws don’t permit it, go ahead anyway.

So, Salatin basically demonstrated his own summation in his presentation:
1) He brought a lot of information to us about gardening and government, gathered it together and presented it as one mass project infected with the politics of libertarianism.
2) He came from another state, not from 1,500 miles away, but he covers a lot more territory than that spreading his word.
3) The information, facts, and figures concerning government, science, corporations, friendly farmers - and a number of causes married up with other effects - seemed to me to be pretty homogenized. A big burger it was, and composed of much dead meat.
4) His treatment focused on the government as being the source of all our problems, and did not elaborate on how we could use his information to improve our lives and our own "terrain".

He was a hit with the audience, gathering applause and ironic laughter on several occasions. Therein lies the sadness of this evening. Salatin could have given us helpful information, he could have used an uplifting tone instead of whining and shrieking. It could have been an inspirational evening instead of a long “I AM A VICTIM” recital. This even more ironic since he constantly made fun of people who act like they are a victim, and the audience which groaned with him when he told his pitiful stories, chuckled with him as he made fun of people who seem to enjoy being “victims” - then he told more tales of what the government and “food police” had done to him and how stupid their reasoning was.

In summation, the presentation was offered as instruction on ways we could begin to grow food at our homes to begin making important changes in our lives, and it would up being a political indoctrination on the "glories" of libertarianism. I was disappointed, and I'll bet WPCC was too.