Food Choice: A Basic Human Right
When we enter the supermarket and see the variety of food items on the shelves, we’re likely to assume that we have a lot of food choice. All those coloured cans and packages offer a facade of difference, but in actuality they're pretty homogeneous. Most food comes from distant places, has long storage dates, is primarily a reconfiguration of genetically-engineered corn and soybeans, and is rife with additives and chemicals.
So when we look down at our plates, there’s often a great deal missing. What if we wanted raw milk instead of cooked and killed milk? How about a neighbour’s quiche from backyard chickens? Homemade charcuterie? How about butter from a nearby grass-fed cow? A beef steak from a backyard-processed animal?
The list of foods prohibited from commerce is surprisingly large and includes most of the traditional items and processes that nourished the human race for millennia. A growing number of folks realise that genetic modification, chemicals and factory farming are not healthy for the ecology or the human micro-biome. But finding alternatives to orthodoxy is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Our modern world embraces human rights and freedom of choice. And yet when it comes to determining the fuel for my body, a micro-managing bureaucracy extends its tentacles into community and neighbour-to-neighbour transactions in a way that shreds the very notion of personal liberty and human rights.
Of course, all of this criminalisation is done in the name of food safety. The overriding premise is that individuals are too stupid or naive to exercise responsible choice on the one hand, and on the other, that all producers—from farmers to multi-national corporations—equally disdain good protocols and play Russian roulette with their customers. This premise is outrageous on both extremities. While some consumers are naive, some are far more savvy about food and farming issues than a horde of government agents. On the other side of the spectrum, to place a neighbour-to-neighbour transaction in the same category as a supermarket item imported from another country is both unfair and preposterous.
The integrity food movement continues to grow out of the distrust that well-read and caring people now exhibit toward the industrial agriculture complex. Experiencing everything from soil loss to food allergens, more and more of us realise something is desperately wrong with our techno-sophisticated food system. But the food-as-machines paradigm does not seem in jeopardy. As if the gift of genetically-modified organisms were not enough, the mainline food and farm giants are now launching food with nano-particles. Do they really believe that’s what we want? Nano-particles coursing through our veins?
If I want to come to your farm, look around, smell around, and then purchase what you produce and process, why must the weight of government and the threats of regulatory minions criminalise the transaction? Choosing the fuel to feed my internal three trillion-member micro-biome must be one of the last sanctuaries for exercising personal choice and autonomy. On the other hand, being able to ply my food craft as farmer and artisan is a sacred right of self-expression. If I can produce it but can’t sell it, what good is the right to property or benefits therefrom? The other side says, “You can sell it to the multi-nationals.” Actually, no I can’t. What industrial food outfit will buy my unvaccinated, unmedicated pastured chickens? What if I don’t want to give my animals drugs or GMO feed? What if I don’t want to lock them in a building?
The single biggest obstacle facing a food and farm paradigm shift is not money, not know-how, not desire. It is the freedom to sell and the freedom to buy. Offer freedom in the marketplace and the explosion of innovative nutrient-dense, ecologically-enhancing products would completely change the face of food and farming. It would not require a government agency. It would not require a tax. It would not require a license. All it requires is a return to something fundamental within the human breast: freedom.
Not freedom for anything, but for something. What could possibly be hazardous about letting two neighbours voluntarily act as consenting adults to engage in food choice? What reasonable person could possibly shiver at such a freedom? Freedom shakes the foundations of the status quo; we haven’t tried it for a very long time. Isn’t it about time?
Joel Salatin is an American farmer, lecturer and author who raises livestock using holistic management methods on his Polyface Farm in Virginia. Read Dumbo Feather’s conversation with him here