I've been reading Joel Salatin's first mainstream book, Folks, This Ain't Normal. It made me laugh out loud several times until I got used to seeing Salatin's irresistable no-nonsense Southern diction on the page (not that I was laughing at it; I was laughing with recognition of the way people who counted as "talkers" spoke in my childhood.)

I came away from the book (which is really a series of essays, I think) all charged up about "OMG we have to get chickens!" and that kind of thing, but there was one point he made along the way that I found very deeply persuasive, and it comes from his belief that the way God does things is written all through the universe. Many people know that Polyface Farm's strategy in essence has been to discover how things work in nature, the way God set it up, and then imitate that. But this example I found particularly thoughtful and telling.


You can read the page I'm talking about on Google books by clicking here. He is talking about sacrifice, death, being necessary for life to come forth. Of course the ultimate example of this is the Cross. But Salatin says that "real truth permeates and threads its way seamlessly through the spiritual and the physical," such that if something "doesn't work spiritually, it won't work physically," and he gives the examples of ultra-pasteurized milk, store-bought cake full of preservatives, or supermarket industrial bread. None of these things will decompose or grow mold with anything like the speed of raw milk, a homemade cake, or fresh real bread. "Only fully alive things can decompose with virility enough to resurrect in us a fully vibrant life. ...If that food went in lifeless, it doesn't have anything else to give, to create in us new cells, new flesh, new bones." I find that really insightful, and the description of something actually having life in it captures very well what it is like to eat the sprouts I've sprouted, or the kefir I've cultured, or the kale I've grown and picked this evening.

"Yet if you look into the average shopping cart coming out of the supermarket today, very little will grow mold if exposed to air and ambient temperature for forty-eight hours.... Processing in modern America seems devoted to making food lifeless."

Could we imagine that the spiritual de-naturing all around us in culture is somehow part and parcel of our not eating food that is acting according to the principles in nature, and actually giving its life that we may live? "We need to eat things that will perish... If they can't perish, they can't give life." Really interesting and unusual thinking there.

The other thing I find helpful is the whole idea of "normal," as enshrined in the title of the book and repeated about every nine freaking pages throughout. There was an article awhile back that pointed out how problematic it was that much of the psychological literature generalizes about the human race based on studies of only the WEIRD people: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic - all traits that are abnormal and exceptional and not such a good bet for making universal claims about human beings. Hmm. In the same way, Salatin points out that nearly everything about our current food system in America is a huge historical anomaly.  For the vast majority of time, the vast majority of people have not lived anything like the highly abnormal way we live at the moment, and it may be that very soon we will have to become more normal ourselves again as well.