Jackson County Local Action Coalition

Presents:

An Evening with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms

Friday, February 19th Conference

Joel Salatin and the other members of the Salatin family operate Polyface Farm, in Swoope Virginia. Their “story” from the farms’ website, www.polyfacefarms.com:

Dancing with Dinner
From food police to hurried, harried Families, our dinner dance partner has ceased to exist. The relationships, the knowledge, and the careful preparation that yield dining intimacy have been replaced by bar codes and plastic packaging, irradiation and high fructose corn syrup, by amalgamated and reconstituted fare. Yet, a food system with integrity depends on each of us reconnecting with the menu: indeed, rediscovering our “dinner dance partner.”

First Session: BUILDING A LOCAL FOOD SYSTEM THAT WORKS.
A fully operational food system needs producers, processors, accountants,marketers, distributors, and consumers. We’ll dive intoeach of these pieces of the pie in order to create a whole. Full of stories and humor, this presentation starts with aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic production models and ends with eaters who know that a chicken has bones.

Second Session: EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL.
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, pro-farmer organizations, or investor networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a tsunami of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems. A call for guerrilla marketing, food choice freedom legislation, and empirical pathogen thresholds offers solutions to these bureaucratic hurdles.

Special Support from Ashland Food Co-op.