135 – Joel Salatin Part 2

Published 11 years ago in food , Permaculture , Podcasts - 0 Comments

Paul Wheaton and Lacia Bailey continue reviewing a video on Joel Salatin at a google event. Joel talks about food innovation being impeded by a number of laws. Visiting a CAFO requires a haz-mat suit and shoes dipped in chemicals. Paul talks about how he prefers to innovate in secrecy, so he is not shut down. Paul talks about planting an inpenetrable hedge around his potential property for privacy. Paul shares about an art teacher that discovered none of her students owned a cooking pot. They talk about the devaluation of food. Lacia talks about leading the way. Lacia suggests outcome based rules rather than procedural based rules, such as a microbial count for selling raw milk. Paul explains how Sepp Holzer takes care of the legality issue. They address the question, Is there such a thing as being a good food elitist? Joel shifts the argument to still being about choice and priority. His position on owning your personhood and self-responsibility is very politically incorrect. Lacia is tired of hearing people say, “We can’t,” using the example of the NW Permaculture Convergence eating food from Costco. There are 36 million acres for recreational horses plus 35 million acres for ornamental lawns, and that’s enough to feed the country without any farms. Joel says, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly first, as opposed to getting stuck in analysis paralysis. He says innovation requires disturbance, and freshening up means cleaning out the old. If Joel were king for a day, he would eliminate all farm subsidies, direct and indirect. He talks about the Food Emancipation proclamation – food freedom of choice. Paul talks about the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Joel talks about tyranny abroad vs. food tyranny by our own government. He would not ban the bad guys, but eliminate the regulation against the good guys. Just offer choice and we would have an explosion in cottage industries. It used to be that we spent 9% of our money on health care, and 18 % on food, and now the numbers are inverted. Joel talks about freedom up, not top down, and scaling up without selling your soul. Cancer is a type of growth, growth is not always what you want. They talk about patenting vs. open source. Joel describes the intimate act of dining – sharing a meal with the people who grew it and prepared it. Google asks Joel how google can help with getting his message out? Paul would like a human influence on search results, so commercial interests and spam do not rule.
Discussing the podcast.

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