Page 16 - Winter2010

The Politics of Food

Standing Toe to Toe

with the Apologists for Industrial Farming

By Joel Salatin

onight I am going to talk in a broad way about the
Text of the politics of food and to examine the assumptions
keynote T made by the apologists for industrial agriculture. I

address think it’s important when we come to the table and begin
delivered by negotiations with the other side that we realize what a
Joel Salatin
at sales opportunity this represents. Those of us who support
Wise small-scale, pasture-based farming and a return to real

Traditions food are selling an idea to our culture, an idea that is now
2010, so foreign to most people that it’s hard for us to conceive
the 11th just how foreign it is.

annual Sometimes it’s good to step back and look in a realistic way at their
conference of assumptions and how they acquired them. I don’t like to use the word
the Weston conspiracy; what’s happened to our agricultural and food systems is not a
A. Price conspiracy but the logical result of a fraternity of ideas. These guys have
Foundation, all been to the same schools, and they all play on the same golf course. Or,

November 14, as Jerry Brunetti says, they all licked the same golf balls that have rolled
2010. through the chemicalized turf.
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