Locavore king

Pop quiz: Can you decode these acronyms? 1.) CAFO; 2.) HFCS; 3.) LFTB. (Answers to follow.)

For the uninitiated, the task of decoding the lingo of industrial agriculture can seem daunting. Luckily, local-food-movement guru Joel Salatin is coming to Chico on April 16 to set us straight on all things edible, as well as the associated inedibles like manure, fast food (yes, that counts as inedible), strange-sounding industrial-agriculture acronyms, and our modern lifestyles that disconnect us from our food.

“It’s the first time that any culture has been able to extract itself so utterly and completely from the responsibility of land stewardship, water stewardship, energy

stewardship,” Salatin said recently in his signature high-energy chirp by phone from his legendary Polyface Farms in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Salatin, who spends a third of his time doing “educational outreach” via speaking engagements across the United States, said he found the young people of our nation have a startling “lack of knowledge and lack of visceral relationships—the mundane requirements of life.

“They’ve never made a dinner from scratch. All they know is the microwave, the can opener, and take-out,” Salatin said. So he set out to write his latest book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal, in which he defines our abnormalities in everything—from a lack of chores for kids, to spending money on televisions and designer jeans, to supporting charities serving Africa, which he claims often causes more trouble than good by undermining the efforts of local farmers and businesspeople.

Say you give up the TV and start gardening and canning instead. What’s the benefit of reconnecting with this normality? “The benefit is you realize that I’m not the center of the universe. And that we are totally and utterly dependent on an ecological umbilical"—the Earth—that, with limited resources, might not be able to sustain us the way we are expecting it to, he said.

What Salatin calls “egocentric hubris"—a symptom of the profound disconnect our society has from the mechanisms of the universe that feed and clothe us—is bound to bring our current way of living to an end, he said. “When someone looks at me and says, ‘But it’s so hard to change,’ I look back at them and say, ‘But you don’t understand—what we are living in right now is a change, a profound change, from thousands and thousands of years of what we know about human history.'”

Salatin’s April appearance will come a little more than a year after his first visit to Chico, when all 700 tickets sold out in 10 days. This time around, sponsors Chaffin Family Orchards and the Chico-Butte Valley chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation are betting that the fiery, hilarious sustainable farmer can pack the Neighborhood Church of Chico, with stadium-style seating that can fit 1,500. The evening appearance is a fundraiser for his keynote speech to be held earlier that day at the much-anticipated Local Food Summit at Lundberg Family Farms’ new conference center in Richvale.

The summit, organized by Brad Banner of the Butte County Department of Environmental Health in partnership with Chaffin Family Orchards, will bring together local food producers and food and health regulators from all over the state, in an attempt to find common ground between the two groups, which have long been at odds over issues from raw milk, to farm-to-fork events, to local meat processing.

Salatin is thrilled that the summit may “get government regulators to appreciate some of the issues that surround local-food movements.”

One of those issues—which Salatin covers thoroughly in his latest book—is that food regulations are written for the big guys.

“Regulations that are written for large industrial, centralized outfits are often inappropriate, unnecessary and actually sometimes prejudicial toward local, transparent, direct farmer-to-consumer trade channels,” causing smaller farmers unnecessary obstacles to selling their products to a willing market, Salatin said. Those large-scale, industrial businesses are the antithesis of Salatin’s own sustainable methods of raising a variety of animals for meat and eggs, which requires little more than movable electric fencing for rotational grazing, and lots of planning, compared to the massive, stationary, concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs, that are the industry’s mainstay.

“I find it amazing that mainline agriculture is still running pell-mell toward concentrated animal-feeding operations,” Salatin said. His rotational-grazing technique utilizes electric fencing to regularly move grazing cows to new pasture. Following those cows are the chickens, who pick larvae out of the cowpies, mimicking the egret-on-the-rhino’s-back symbiosis of nature. His website calls this “a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production mode,” in typical long-winded, even silly-sounding Salatinese. But the methods are far from silly—they’ve been adopted by farmers across the country, and most notably they’re utilized by Chaffin Family Orchards, the co-sponsor of both Salatin events.

Salatin and his farm have been featured in Michael Pollan’s bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as well as in widely known “foodie” movies, Food, Inc., Farmageddon and FRESH.

Salatin is thrilled by what he calls “the local-food tsunami. … I feel like we’re on a surfboard riding this crest right now, and it’s kind of different to be all your life the ugly stepsister, and then wake up one morning, and suddenly you’re chic.”

But he recognizes that we have a long way to go. “What has become normal food in our culture right now is completely aberrant food. We’ve never had high-fructose corn syrup [HFCS]” he said. “We’ve never had food that wouldn’t mold on the table at room temperature.”

And what about lean finely textured beef (LFTB)—or “pink slime"—that’s been making headlines across the nation? “Well, it’s just more of the same. It’s a mish-mash of a fabricated slurry that we’ve never eaten before.”

“We eat sugar, we eat junk [and] unpronounceable food, and assume that the pharmacy’s going to take care of us,” said Salatin. “We have a much closer relationship with the latest belly-button piercings of Hollywood celebrities … than we have with what’s going to become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.”