I have met Joel Salatin and seen his farm. He practices what he preaches and the Polyface team is a group of real, down to earth folks. This book demands action. I can no longer shop for food without thinking of the precepts laid out in this excellent work. I plan to read through it again with pen and paper in hand and then move on to another of Joel's books. As he says in the book, we can opt out of a lot of things, and so not have to think about them (such as television) but we cannot opt out of the food system, and the American food system is severely messed up.

Read Michael Pollen and skip this. He is doing good things with his farming practices but everything else he has to say is not worth reading.

I don't completely disagree with Salatin's opinions on industrial food, but this book ended up being more polemical than informative, which is what I had been looking for.

Written by the libertarian Christian farmer behind Polyface Farm, the paragon of sustainability featured in Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” this book hopes to empower food buyers to pursue positive alternatives to the industrialized food system, to educate food buyers about production methods, and to create a food system that enhances nature’s ecology for future generations.

God no.

Joel Salatin and his amazing farm in Swoope, VA, were featured in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. This is Salatin's attempt to educate us food buyers about the dangers of the industrialized food chain and the wonders of natural, "beyond organic" grass-fed beef. Though his writing is not excellent, his entertaining rants against government interference and politicians of all stripes gave me the sense I was reading something from an earlier era. This will probably be hard to find, so if any workmates are interested I'll lend you my book.

I first heard about Polyface Farm from Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I was very impressed by Pollan's description of the farm. This book by Joel Salatin, the owner of Polyface Farm, does not describe his farm in detail. Instead, he gives advice to non-farmers, about how to go about buying food. The key is to find LOCAL farmers, and give them your business. You can trust local farmers, because they are accountable to their local customers, rather than to some industrial complex. It's all about trust, and not government inspections, organic labels, and regulations.

There is a great deal of sarcasm in this book, lots of humor, a good deal of ranting and raving and preaching, and maybe even some prejudices. If you can get past all that, you can learn a lot about the problems that small-scale, local farmers face. And you can learn how to really help the environment, and your health, by avoiding factory-produced foods (including livestock that has been fed with grain and manure).

Guru of small farmers.
Food sanity.
Gov't regulations are crazy.
How hard it is to sell what you produce on a farm.
Death of the small family farm.

641.31

No huge epiphanies in this one but a good resource to use for marketing clean food.

You can get the point of this book in the first two chapters, but overall a good read. I enjoy Stalin's light, funny, and yet sometimes piercing and satirical style. I definitely learned more about local eating, especially knowing the producers of my food and being committed to local and sustainable over organic, etc.

Where do bobby pins go? You start out with a package of 1000, and soon they are all gone and you are scanning the sidewalk for any rusty old bobby pin to get your damn hair out of your eyes or to use as a bookmark. When I got this book from the library, it had two bobby pins in it. So, to the last person to check out this book from the Monroe County Public Library: thanks, I needed those!