The Food Buyer's Guide To Farm Friendly Food
by Joel Salatin
160pp
If you are curious to know more about Joel Salatin and his work, this book is the place to start. Holy Cows and Hog Heaven is brief and engaging, less expensive than his other books, and focused on a topic that is relevant to everyone—gaining control over the quality of the food you eat.
Joel Salatin has a vision, and it is not a pipedream. He has worked for more than twenty years to develop a model of small scale farming that is humane, healthy, diverse, enjoyable, and profitable. His own farm, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, puts his model into practice, and for many years people have come to Polyface to observe, study, and learn. After proving his model, Salatin began to put his expertise into books so that it would be more widely available. As he's done so, his zeal for sharing his vision of creating an alternative to the industrial food system has increased, and his writing has become ever more personal.
Holy Cows and Hog Heaven is Salatin's most recent book, and it presents his vision at the deepest level. As he puts it, the book “has one overriding objective: encourage every food buyer to embrace the notion that menus are are a conscious decision, creating the next generation's world one bite at a time.” Put another way, the world's food supply is in abysmal shape in large part because of our abysmal buying habits—but incremental improvements in our habits will lead to incremental improvements in the food supply.
This incremental, practical attitude is why we esteem Salatin head and shoulders above other good writers on agrarian topics. Too often when exploring the subject we end up in a weird place, despairing over the way things are while daydreaming about what might have been. Or, worse, we plunge in with the zeal of the converted, zeal that fails us because it isn't accompanied by wisdom and humility. Salatin is very good at not only persuading you of his vision, but also showing you the small and manageable steps that constitute real progress towards achieving the vision.
Aside from being a powerful presentation of the core of his vision, Holy Cows and Hog Heaven is also a delightful introduction to Salatin's work. He explains the horrors of modern industrial farming techniques simply and vividly. His explanation of the small-scale alternative is clear and engaging. The book is brimming with stories of corporate malfeasance and government stupidity. And nobody is let off the hook; both farmers and consumers will have many opportunities to pause in embarrassment. Yet the overall tone is so positive and optimistic that any observation that stings the reader is less likely to offend him than to motivate him.
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