by Katie Liljedahl
The self proclaimed Christian, Libertarian, Radical Lunatic Joel Salatin featured in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, comes to Santa Barbara and speaks of stewardship, transparency, and the path to re-localizing our food system so eloquently that even a Red Baron frozen pizza eating girl now understands the process of carbon combustion in fertilizer and the brilliance of the electric fence.
“I have seen them shove dry ice up the rectums of chickens to blow them up. I have seen them stuff the head of one inside the rectum of another, making a kind train of birds. I have seen people bash the birds against the belt, throw them into the walls, stomp them, throw them into the walls again, stomp them and throw them into fans or squeeze them so hard they would spray feces all over another worker (you could hear the bones pop in the rib cages when they did this.)" - Former Tyson Food Employee Virgil Butler describing the slaughterhouse floor of the company’s chicken processing plan in Satya Magazine February 2006
“We are drowning in our industrial feces.” Adbusters
I haven’t quite found my niche in this great movement of awakening, but I will tell you right now - it is not farming.
I love psycho spiritual talks of the spiraling evolution of DNA. I love writing self deprecating confessions regarding my dysfunctional relationship with my Citibank credit card with which no matter how many times I break up with cannot stop sleeping with again. I take part and parcel in this movement by doing downward dogs with four year old children through my Peanut Butter and Yoga program, and by promoting the ideas put forth by Richard Louv of getting children off Sponge Bob Square Pants and onto tree stumps, moss, mud, and rope swings.
But I do not farm. If I had to choose one area of my life in which I feel my values are the most disconnected with my actions, it would be my eating lifestyle. So not only do I not farm, I don’t even belong to the group of people who know what to do with polenta or quinoa and know what gluten even is and why you would want to be free of it. I eye those people enviously in the bulk section of the Co Op as they pick out their ingredients according to their prepared list as I look at the Bulk Section and only recognize the trail mix.
I make killer lasagna. My mother’s side of the family is full blooded Sicilian and ate Prince Spaghetti Dinners every Wednesday at 4:00 in the afternoon. From my mother, I learned how to make homemade lasagna and once you know lasagna, you then know how to cook stuffed shells, manicotti, and ziti. I tricked myself into thinking I knew how to cook when really the extent of my knowledge beyond ricotta and mozzarella cheese is embarrassingly low. So not only am I not a farmer, I am a self proclaimed progressive, hippie, spiritual, green, environmentally concscious goddess who eats Red Baron frozen pizzas and often cooks her dinner in the microwave.
Yet, there I found myself, thanks to my one and only fan (literally), Bob Banner of HopeDance magazine (and edible SLO), at a workshop where the participants were people at the forefront of the local food movement such as the editor of Edible Santa Barbara as well as the people at the heart of the local food movement-farmers.
So I will admit that I spent the majority of the workshop on the borderline of utter perplexity, however, not once did this confusement resemble boredom. In fact, quite the opposite-I was awestruck. My perplexity border lined fascination, inspiration, and awe and it was this thirst for knowledge that allowed me to drink up as much of Joel Salatin’s bottomless wellspring of knowledge that I could.
A workshop with Joel Salatin, a self proclaimed “Christian libertarian radical lunatic” is like snorting an eight ball of logic. He is an inferno of intelligence and brilliance on every subject whether it be the economics of the lumber industry, the most ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen for composting, or the needed blending of the “holistic, spiritual, ethical eastern modalities with the compartmentalized, individualized, and democratized western methodologies” in order to bring moral, ethics, health, wellness, and spirit back into the way we grow, distribute, consume, cook, and eat food.
We live in a culture in which at the turn of a faucet - water appears; at the push of a lever - waste spins away. In our world light comes by the flip of a switch, gas comes from a nozzle, and food comes from a freezer in a grocery store.
Excitingly (yet with unbearable tardiness), we are beginning to ponder the big magical word “Where?” Where does my water come from? Where does it go? Where does the oil come from? Where does my waste spin off to? And of course the most transformational one is: Where does my food come from? Where was it grown, shipped, processed, shipped again, stored, delivered, packaged, and shipped once again?
If only food could talk…
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that this disconnect has not only harmed us but that those involved in industrial agriculture (yes, even the tyrannical Monsanto) are victims of this monstrosity of a machine.
Industrial agriculture is “so repugnant that no one wants them near and so they hide where no one can see them” and are then disconnected from their consumer base and cut off from the faces of the people with whom they do business. All sense of stewardship, relationship, connection, and accountability is gone. There is zero transparency. A zero transparency business in a society based on capitalism and drenched in consumerism is a breeding zone for deceitful business tactics. Industrial Agriculture is so far removed from its customers that we are not just nameless consumers- we are numbers, percentages, bottom lines, profit margins, and ultimately CEO pension plans.
This means that the resource in which is at stake - cows, tomatoes, pigs, bananas, chickens and so forth is treated in the same manner - it is reduced to numbers. Joel Salatin asked this: How well do you treat your wedding ring compared to your paper clips? We treat that of which we value with respect, dignity, and caution. There is no sense of this type of value with industrial agriculture because there is no sense of stewardship and connection to that which they are selling. It is too big. It is a monster.
“Welcome to the Machine.”
This is why Joel Salatin began the workshop by talking about stewardship. Relocalizing food brings back a sense of stewardship for the farmer toward his/her land and resources. Stewardship promotes integrity, ethics, and transparency. It promotes exposure verse secrecy.
The United States Government has declared it a matter of national security that we do not see the manufacturing process of our food in order to prevent contamination and disease. I feel it should be a constitutional right that I am allowed to witness the butchering process of the cow I will chew or the milking process of the milk I will swallow.
Capitalistic single use agriculture enslaves generations by stealing the opportunity for stewardship from not only the current family of farmers but the generation to come. Joel shared that if you brought his innovative and out of the box ideas to most farmers, you would send them into “epileptic seizures” because the idea of abandoning what has always been done is too costly and risky and they rely too much on the subsidy from the US Government to go changing any systems in place.
To sum up our disconnect with our food I want to share this fact: it is now common place for a food product to boast on its packaging that it is “natural.” Our food, that in which we eat, now brags and stands out from the rest because of it’s claim of being natural. I noticed this when sleepwalking through the linoleum, fluorescent lit isles of Vons. I picked up a box of White Cheddar CheezIts and the box boasted All Natural! as if I was supposed to wave the box high and shake it with pride at its proximity to the earthly soil. This perfectly square and white cheddared chip of goodness is natural? This claim compelled me to look up natural in the dictionary. The definition is as follows:
natural-existing in or in conformity with nature or the observable world; neither supernatural nor magical; "a perfectly natural explanation"
How in God’s green earth does this white cheddar CheezIt have an explanation of its existence that could be considered “perfectly natural?”
I was a teacher’s aid (god bless them) at Santa Barbara Charter School for two years. During this time, I discovered that kids today do not know that carrots grow underground. I myself, since the Salatin training, have rediscovered the glorious carrot in its original form. I stopped buying baby peeled, bright orange carrots in plastic bags. Instead I opt for the twisted up witch’s nose carrots in the produce section or from the farmers market. It is at the market that I can look the grower in the eye and know that this carrot is not natural because a box says so but because the carrot itself tells me, as does the grower who I see with my two eyes and touch during the exchange of currency.
We have lost the human connection to food. More and more it is becoming a commodity to ingest rather than a living being to reciprocate and exchange energy and longing for. If re-localizing food cannot kick start our local economies, at the very least it can reconnect us with that which sustains life- our food. At the very least it can bring back a sense of community to the growing, processing, distributing, selling, buying, cooking, and eating of food. That alone could bring us one step closer to our humanness and away from the robotic state in which we so often find ourselves. I want to thank Bob Banner for giving me the opportunity to snort some Salatin and reconnect to the wondrous creation of the carrot and Frying Pan Catering for preparing the most glorious catered meals to the workshop.
Katie Liljedahl is a writer living in Santa Barbara. She can be reached at
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