By Joel Salatin

The operative word of our time is disentanglement. How many people do we run into that say, I just want to disentangle. I don’t want to feel dependent on the education system. So we have a tsunami of homeschooling.

I don’t want to be dependent on the healthcare system. So we have a tsunami of medical quacks, many of them speaking here. We all want to go to a quack these days. Absolutely. All right. Financially, we’re all concerned. Where’s the money going? So 401(k) plans are being converted into living, moving, and knowing.[…]

And food. Food we’re realizing every day and really gaining momentum through the efforts of RFK, Jr. and MAHA, how inauthentic and unacceptable our food supply is.

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I don’t trust Procter and Gamble.

I don’t trust Nestle’s.

I don’t trust Hershey’s.

Basically, when they shut down the tobacco companies, all of that laboratory and scientific chemical knowledge got scarfed up by the big food companies and the tobacco experts are formulating our food, and that’s why we now have – what is it – 70,000 food additives that are unpronounceable. The European Union only has 400, and so the whole ultra-processed food thing has come down to us. So I want to know what’s in the pantry. I want to know what’s on the table for my kiddos. Think about our children. Our children from a homestead situation. We now know that how we build an immune system is eating dirt, playing in the dirt, getting dirt under our fingernails.

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If we had a food emancipation proclamation, here are the benefits quickly.

Number one, production would never leave the farm for processing. This would create a 30 to 40% price savings of local food. People always accuse us in the local food business, oh, you’re a bunch of elitists. Look how expensive your price is. Well, it’s largely because we’re trying to squeeze an artisanal product through an industrial commodity paradigm and it doesn’t work.

Harvard Business Review did a study on craft versus commodity. People make money in commodities. Absolutely. People make money in craft. Absolutely. The problem comes when craft tries to be a commodity and commodity tries to be craft. And right now we have a craft product being struck, pushed through an industrial paradigm and it doesn’t work. High-priced craft food competes with commodities. The production [needs] to stay on the farm with all the benefits.

Number two, the production waste streams are integrated in other farm enterprises. We could compost the guts. If you’re making cheese, you can feed the whey to your pigs, the animal edibles, all these things. This creates a fundamentally circular integrated carbon and food system. The big problem – one of the big problems we have in our food system is – it’s fundamentally segregated. We have broken apart all these beautiful, synergistic, symbiotic relationships. That’s why chickens and pigs were always next to the homestead because they ate the kitchen scraps and the garden junk. And when we take all this off-farm, we don’t close that loop.

Number three, there’s an economic on-ramp for new entrepreneurial farmers by being able to access the retail dollar. I meet thousands and thousands of homesteaders and small farmers around this country who could easily make a full-time living on a 10-acre place if they could sell retail.

Number four, affordable choice for buyers. Affordable choice for buyers. If we open this, the options for food, you can’t even imagine what kind of options there would be. Aunt Alice’s summer sausage, Uncle Jim’s charcuterie. There would be so many options. You can’t even imagine it. Aren’t we interested in choice?

Number five: Food deserts would be eliminated [if] every vacant lot in the city with an entrepreneur-savvy nearby tenant [who] could grow food in that vacant lot and sell it to their neighbors. Today, if somebody grew food in there and made a pot pie for the folks in the apartment complex, within five minutes of selling the first one to a voluntary consenting informed buyer, there’d be six bureaucrats knocking on your door.

“This isn’t zoned for business. Where’s your fire extinguisher? Where’s your separate toilet? Where’s your HACCP plan? Where’s your cold chain?” All this stuff. And so the food deserts persist.

Number six, we would dismantle the oligarchy. Bernie Sanders and AOC are running around the country. “Got to stop the oligarchy. Got to stop the oligarchy.”

Well, the only way they can envision to stop the oligarchy is a bigger government program or agency to police the oligarchy. That’s what we’ve been doing for a century. And look where it’s gotten us. Upton Sinclair thought it was a monopoly in 1906 when seven companies controlled 50 percent in the meat supply. Today, after the government’s intervention to protect us in the food system, four companies control 85%.

And we think that’s a free market. The reason that we’re so consolidated and centralized is not because of a free market. It’s because for a century and more the government has put its hands on the scale in prejudicial, concessionary regulations that make big outfits cheaper to run than small ones.

And number seven, and finally, this could all be done with zero government agencies, no expenses, no bureaucrats, and no elevated taxes. What’s there not to love?

So how do we create change the quickest and the easiest? I’m not an abolitionist. Is that the best way to change? Criminalizing what we don’t like? I suggest we get where we want quicker and easier by creating a functional underground railroad. A functional underground railroad. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a college in California to a bunch of students in a lecture hall. And during Q&A, something just prompted me to ask a question spontaneously. I said, I want to see a show of hands. How many of you think that in order to eat a carrot from your own garden, a government inspector should have to certify that it’s safe to eat? And a third of the hands went up.  It’s in California.

But I want you to just think about that for a moment right now. Folks, we have momentum. We have momentum. And the fastest way to health is good food. And the fastest way to good food is to unshackle farmers and buyers from food police slavery. So I don’t apologize. So what’s my dream? What’s my dream goal? I’ll tell you, my dream goal is: I want 30 minutes with Trump. I believe that if I made this pitch to Trump, he would be all over it.

What could be more Trumpian than a Food Emancipation Proclamation? And I close with this. What good is it to have the freedom to pray and preach and assemble if we don’t have the freedom to choose the fuel for our bodies to go pray, preach, and assemble? The only reason our Founders didn’t guarantee us the right to food choice is because they couldn’t have imagined a day when you couldn’t buy a glass of raw milk from your neighbor.

You couldn’t buy a neighbor’s summer sausage and you couldn’t buy a neighbor’s tomato salad or tomato soup. They couldn’t have imagined it. But here’s where we are today. And I suggest that a food emancipation proclamation is a way to solve multiple issues and multiple problems, not with regulations. I mean, the most disempowering thing you can do to a citizenry is to say the only way to solve this is with regulations.

That’s the most disempowering citizen thing to do. Citizenry. No. The way to solve these things is by letting grassroots, entrepreneurism bubble up and giving thousands and thousands of food producers access to the market, chipping away at the oligarchy and giving us a food choice -freedom for safer, more secure, more stable food supplies that is empowered by a whole bunch of speedboats and not a big aircraft carrier.

How many of you’re with me? Yeah, let’s do it.

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Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-food-emancipation-proclamation/