Joel Salatin interviewed by The Guardian

Since being highlighted in Eric Schlosser's film Food, Inc, local food movement hero Joel Salatin is bringing much needed attention to horrors and human arrogance of industrial farming and then to the chemical-free farming methods Michael Pollan praised him for in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Guardian recently interviewed Salatin and oublished an incredible article. Find it here. Here are some highlights:

From The Guardian's Gaby Wood:

"...in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the market; now the top four control more than 80% – meaning that if ever meat is tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans – something the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country's huge industrial slaughterhouses."

And from Salatin:

[Quotes Joel Arthur Barker on paradigms] "...every paradigm, he says, exceeds its point of efficiency. Agriculture is always the last sector to join the new economy, because farmers are very conservative. So only now has the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability, Salatin explains. "What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'"

And Salatin's five reasons why we should eat his meat:

1.) "...it's safer from a bio-security standpoint. If you eat our stuff, it's gonna be only sold real close right here. There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is – the fresher, the more transparent that system is – the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage. You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food." 2.) "Number two is what I would call your own personal immune system." The more antibiotics are given to the animals we eat, he explains, the less responsive we become to antibiotics when we need them for medical reasons. "You've been drugging yourself at dinner every day." 3.) "Thirdly, he goes on, they've had their meats checked, and they are unequalled in their nutritional density and power, however you want to measure it – "Omega 3, omega 6 ratios, riboflavin, polyunsaturated fats, vitamin A…" 4.) "It tastes better." 5.) "It's better for the environment. It's a very landscape-therapeutic production model."

(Thnx MP)