Chapter Eleven – The Animals: Practicing Complexity
Précis
In rotational grazing, the animals do all of the work; each animal benefits the other, whether it be sanitizing, fertilizing, feeding, or another process that creates a healthy farm.
Gems
“But Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone,” (p. 209).
“In nature you’ll always find birds following herbivores...The egret perched on the rhino’s nose, the pheasants and turkeys trailing after the bison – that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate,” (p. 211).
“In an ecological system like this everything’s connected to everything else, so you can’t change one thing without changing ten other things,” (p. 213).
“Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die,” (p. 214).
“By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence – by definition the very opposite of simplification,” (p. 214).
“Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back,” (p. 221).
Thoughts
Sustainability is highly present in rotational grazing. The animals all depend on each other to thrive, which I find really interesting. Nature obviously evolved with this codependency in mind; it seems silly to ever change it. What first sparked in Salatin’s father’s mind that made him think this was a good idea? It seems odd that it would occur to so few people. Nature is complex; therefore harvesting nature must also be complex too. By simplifying farming, we are taking away from the farm’s quality. We try to benefit ourselves with simplicity but end up damaging our bodies in return.
Why does the government make it so hard for organic and rotational grazing farms? Should they not be encouraging them? Salatin has a pretty good production rate, and with more farms just like him all over the country, rotational grazing could really blossom. This type of farming may not be able to supply mass production, but with the way our society is right now, we should really be looking towards quality instead of quantity anyway.
It is good that Salatin sends out a letter to make people aware of his farm. Without this small promotion, no one would really know about it, since the mass media revolves around larger producers. Why is more of America not aware of these types of farms? The media is so centered on organic now, you would think that they would advertise grass fed animals too, an even healthier option. But maybe it is because bottom line is they still favor industry because of its efficiency. Rotational grazing really falls apart when it becomes industrialized, possibly not making it as favorable among the media.
Chapter Twelve – Slaughter: In a Glass Abattoir
Précis
Chicken slaughtering is vital but a messy process. Because the slaughter is not performed as often in rotational grazing farming, people are able to maintain their humanity.
Gems
“The problem with current food-safety regulations, in Joel’s view, is that they are one-size-fits-all rules designed to regulate giant slaughterhouses that are mindlessly applied to small farms...” (p. 229).
“Slaughter is dehumanizing work if you have to do it everyday,” (p. 233).
“...The pastoral idyll has always felt itself besieged by malign outside forces, and on this farm that role is played by the government and the big processing companies who interests they serve,” (p. 230).
“...However scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,” (p. 226/7).
Thoughts
The ways of slaughtering in rotational grazing farming seems much more effective. The chickens are treated much better, and the people are able to keep their integrity. Having the “slaughterhouse” open so that costumers can see how it is done is also a really great idea. It shows the costumer that they have nothing to hide and creates a strong trustworthy relationship between the customer and farmer. Why do large manufacturers tend to hide so much? If they had an honest business, there probably would not be such a strong need for an alternative food system.
The government creates far too many rules for the small farmer. I find it unfair of them to hinder these small businesses when they are actually following the rules of nature. I wonder if they intend to do this for a reason other than the fact that the farms are not so easily industrialized. Knowing America, I am sure somebody has come up with some conspiracy theory that entails the government’s alternative motives. It seems odd to me that they would try to limit something that would actually do some good in our country.
Chapter Thirteen – The Market: “Greetings from the Non-Barcode People”
Précis
Buying food directly from farms insures the integrity of the farm and offers a more communal environment as opposed to a supermarket.
Gems
“He believes 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,” (p. 240).
“I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food,” (p. 243).
“Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn’t attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect,” (p. 249).
“We can still decide, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another,” (p. 257).
Thoughts
It is good that Salatin sends out a letter to make people aware of his farm. Without this small promotion, no one would really know about it, since the mass media revolves around larger producers. Why is more of America not aware of these types of farms? The media is so centered on organic now, you would think that they would advertise grass fed animals too, an even healthier option. But maybe it is because bottom line is they still favor industry because of its efficiency. Rotational grazing really falls apart when it becomes industrialized, possibly not making it as favorable among the media.
Chapter Fourteen – The Meal: Grass Fed
Précis
Grass fed foods have a higher nutritional and health value as they can help ward off disease, and taste more like themselves. These benefits naturally come from the fact that we have evolved to eat grass fed animals.
Gems
“The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of the civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked – nature into culture,” (p. 264).
“Taking the long view of human nutrition, we evolved to eat the sort of foods available to hunter-gatherers, most of whose genes we’ve inherited and whose bodies we still (more or less) inhabit,” (p. 267).
“As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food,” (p. 269).
“When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too,” (p. 271).
“Every meal we share at a table recapitulates this evolution form nature to culture, as we pass from satisfying our animal appetites in semisilence to the lofting of conversational balloons,” (p. 272).
Thoughts
I never realized that grass fed animals were this beneficial, but I guess it makes sense. When people switched over to eating so much corn, did they not get sick really often? I understand that there are a lot of health setbacks, but was there a subtle but effective change? It seems as if we did not realize what we were getting into before it was too late; now we are stuck with this industrial mindset.
Hearing about the “real taste” of chickens makes me really curious. My mother buys her meat from the butcher, but does this mean I have never tasted really meat? Is everything I have been eating corn fed? If so, then this means that I do not know the actual taste of the food. It seems though that it would be really hard to find good quality meat, even in the city. If there was more opportunity to find good quality food, I would definitely make the effort to buy it, even if it was more expensive.
Chapter Fifteen – The Forager
Précis
The hunter/gatherer method would not survive in our society because we would outnumber our game. It is vital though to prepare a meal with full consciousness of how it was created, which the hunter/gatherer method allows.
Gems
“So even if we wanted to go back to hunting and gathering wild species, it’s not an option: There are far too many of us and not nearly enough of them,” (p. 279).
“By contrast the hunter, at least as I imagined him, is alone in the woods with his conscience,” (p. 281).
“For most of us today hunting and gathering and growing our own food is by and large a form of play,” (p. 280).
“We don’t have to go back to the Pleistocene...because our bodies never left,” (p. 280).
Thoughts
The hunter/gatherer method seems sustainable, but probably would not thrive in our world. First of all, there are not even enough animals for us to have a constant supply and that would create even more conflicts because of competition. The method probably died out because it could not supply enough food for everyone with such a growing community.
It does seem though that we are made for this type of food collection. Why could we not have evolved then, to do it in larger quantities to support the society? We are changing the nature of our bodies when we eat a surplus of grain. Hunting also seems as though the individual could be confident in their food choices; they obviously know where their food came from because they made it themselves. In our society, who would not want this reassurance? We focus so much on our health but lack the ability to recognize that there are methods that could really benefit it, ones that our body is fit for.
Chapter Sixteen – The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Précis
The omnivore’s dilemma is that as humans we can eat anything, but with that comes the stress of figuring out what exactly to eat. The American society has built a structure of guidelines to make the process easier, but it is prone to change.
Gems
“The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own,” (p. 287).
“For the omnivore a tremendous amount of mental wiring must be devoted to sensory and cognitive tools for figuring out which of all these questionable nutrients it is safe to eat,” (p. 291).
“Cooking, one of the omnivore’s cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility,” (p. 293).
“The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies; one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes with the gut,” (p. 294).
“Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a basin filled with the best meats, and a cat upon heaps of fruits and grains, although each could very well nourish itself on the food it disdains if it made up its mind to try some,” (p. 297).
Thoughts
The omnivore’s dilemma is an interesting one; it is something I have never really thought about. In America it is even harder because we do not have a national food. If we did have a national eating custom, such as the Europeans, would we have less health problems? Even if we would not have as many, it is too late to change anything now. People have become too lazy and would most likely be skeptic. Our food system seems to work good enough though, in the ways that it makes our choices a little bit easier, but of course not any healthier.
Why did we evolve to be this way? I do not understand why rats’ and our eating habits cover such a broad area. Why us? Is it that humans were developing faster than other animals, or was it just by accident? I found myself wondering at one point in the text if something like grass or corn had evolved to take over society, and we were at their mercy. But I guess we are, as discussed in the first chapters of the book. We subconsciously promote their production by doing things such as mowing the lawn. Yes of course we do also do it consciously in the creation of farms, but maybe we really are just serving them.
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