Via Michael Dougherty.

Mother Jones has a profile of “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin. Two relevant quotes:

In Joel?s view, the reformation of our food economy begins with people going to the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know??relationship marketing,? the approach he urges in his recent book, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer?s Guide to Farm Friendly Food. Joel believes that the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. ?Don?t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food??

And

Shortly before I traveled to Virginia, I?d reread an essay by Wendell Berry in which he argued that reversing the damage done to local economies and the land by the juggernaut of world trade would take nothing less than ?a revolt of local small producers and local consumers against the global industrialism of the corporations.? He detected the beginnings of such a rebellion in the rise of local food systems and the growing market ?for good, fresh, trustworthy food, food from producers known and trusted by consumers.? Which, as he points out, ?cannot be produced by a global corporation.? Berry would have me believe that what I was seeing in the Polyface salesroom represented a local uprising in a gathering worldwide rebellion against what he calls ?the total economy.?

Why should food, of all things, be the linchpin of that rebellion? Perhaps because food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity. When Jos? Bov?, the French Roquefort farmer and anti-globalization activist, wanted to make his stand against globalization, he used his tractor to smash not a bank or insurance company but a McDonald?s. Indeed, the most powerful protests against globalization to date have revolved around food: I?m thinking of the movement against genetically modified crops, the campaign against patented seeds in India (which a few years ago brought as many as half a million Indians into the streets to protest World Trade Organization intellectual property rules), and Slow Food, the Italian-born international move- ment that seeks to defend traditional food cultures against the global tide of homogenization.

Posted on 9 May 2006