Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food

Joel Salatin is a nut! But from my experience, all visionaries tend to be a bit nutty. I came to reading this book after reading Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is a great book in it's own right, and which dedicates a generous portion of its pages to Joel Salatin and his farm. Joel Salatin is among the minority of Americans who have a keen insight into just how far this country has gotten off track, and he is dedicating his life to doing whatever he can to get people back on track. I am guessing he is a deeply happy man (if not a tad disturbed), because it shows in his love for the earth and the food it creates with his generous help. This book will change the way you eat, or if not that, it will at least change the way you think while you stroll the isles at the supermarket, browsing isle after isle of plastic food. It has had a very positive effect on me and my family, and I recommend it to anyone who pauses, even for a moment, to consider the quality of the food that they eat. If you don't waste time on such trivialities, well maybe it is time that you did, for the sake of yourself, your race and the earth. Joel Salatin will help you navigate the territory. Joel, I could have done without the Christian rhetoric, particularly the anti-abortion sentiment that peppered your book. I understand though ... you don't seem to be able to contain your passions any more than I can mine. We differ on some things, but agree on most. The writing can be a bit tricky in places, leaving me re-reading sentences over a few times, trying to decipher the meaning. But, all in all, this is a great book, and should be required reading for every citizen, non-citizen and illegal immigrant that shares this great country in decline. I weep for the future, but Joel Salatin provides me with a little ray of hope.

This book has transformed the way I look at the food on my family's table. For pretty much my whole life, I had absolutely no problems with "industrial" food products. I trusted them as being safe, somewhat nutritious, and fairly tasty. I didn't make any effort to avoid processed foods - heck, I figured they were actually pretty nutritious with all the vitamins and minerals that were sprayed on them. When I visited my farming grandparents in Maine (very small family farm closer to Polyface than a monocrop giant), I DID notice how amazingly delicious their simple foods were - potatoes I had dug out of the ground earlier that afternoon, freshly picked peas and corn on the cob, and perhaps some lettuce, tomatoes, other greens, and butter pickles my grandmother had pickled herself. I loved collecting the eggs from their hens, picking chives from their garden, and watching my grandmother can stewed tomatoes from her garden. However, I took it for granted that times had changed and their way of life was, by necessity, going the way of the ox and cart. In fact, the first time I visited a farmer's market I was taken aback by the prices, which were significantly higher than our grocery store. I completely missed the point of what a farmer's market represented. This book, however, turned me completely around as far as food is concerned. I was fascinated by Joel Salatin's descriptions of his farming practices versus industrial farming practices. After reading this book, I joined a local CSA and signed up for a local delivery of Polyface meat (lucky me!!) I frequent farmers markets and feel a genuine sense of gratitude towards the people who work their land and sell their crops, thereby giving people like me and my family an alternative to the supermarket chains, at least for part of the year. But this book resonates beyond the idea of eating locally and supporting farmers (even if it costs more) who farm in a self-sustaining way. It is really a wake-up call for consciousness about everything we take for granted. It is a wake-up call to recognize the choices we make every single day. It is a wake-up call to shake off the sense of apathy and of "what can one person possibly do." We can't do everything, but that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility to do the small things that we can. A+++ (and his meat and eggs really ARE delicious!)

Written by a farmer, Holy Cows & Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide To Farm Friendly Food is intended to empower food buyers to choose other than from the big industrialized farm system. Menus and what's chosen for them is a conscious decision, Joel Salatin maintains: eating in sync with the season rather than choosing imported foods, understanding specialty and diversification in foods, and getting sanity back into food regulations are only a few of the topics addressed in a title designed to return eaters to neighbor-friendly terms.

Most of Joel Salatin's books have been aimed at small farmers or land-owners looking for an agriculture enterprise. Being in that category, I have enjoyed them all. But trying to explain to most people why it's important to understand the difference between industrial food and local food, has been hard. This is the first book of his that anyone, farmer or not, can pick up and immediately understand the serious issues involved with the American food supply, and to embrace the solution. I was always a conservative pro-business Republican until I bought my first milk cow, thinking of selling all of that great pure raw milk. Right. I then read William Campbell Douglas's 'The Milk Book' and began to understand the unnatural relationship that exists between big business and governmental regulatory agencies. Suddenly the question of 'What ever happened to the small family farmer' began to be all too clear. I also spent six months and a lot of sweat and love raising a few organic hogs, only to find all of the packaged meat stamped 'Not For Sale' from the processor. I argued that my pork was more pure and wholesome than anything from the supermarket, not to mention that it was a USDA inspected facility. But the butcher explained that although that may be so, the state Department of Agriculture mandates any locally raised meat may not be sold. Holy Cows and Hog Heaven delves deep into these issues and provides a lot of hope for the 'natural' farmer as well as the consumer. There's no doubt that at some point the problems associated with industrial food will come to a head. We now have Mad-cow, Avian-flu, SARS, and Hepatitis outbreaks. All of these have been traced to confinement operations or un-clean foreign-raised crops. The question is when that time comes what will be done about it. If the government and agri-business are allowed to define the problem, we as small farmers will be targeted directly, unto extinction. But if the truth is allowed to spread now, the consumer can define the issues and local farm-friendly food will be the solution. I agree with the previous reviewer, if you like this book, buy several copies and give them to your friends who don't realize what is at stake.

A review by Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Cooperative If I had a million dollars, I think I would spend a substantial amount of it to buy copies of Joel Salatin's new book, "Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: the food buyer's guide to farm friendly food", and give them away. I spend a lot of my creative time trying to figure out ways to encourage people to buy local foods, specifically in our case, Oklahoma foods. It's a two-sided process. You have to talk with the producers, and help them understand how city people think about local food and what the farmer needs to do to help people buy their locally produced foods. You have to talk with the customers, so that they understand the opportunities, and the limitations, of the local food market as it presently is. Before both you have to dangle bundles of carrots, "just keep moving in this direction, it's not far, we'll get there, it will be great when we do get there", and so on and so forth in a thousand different iterations just in the past 12 months since we put up our Oklahoma Food Cooperative shingle and got into the local food marketplace bidness. Neither farmer nor customer really understands the other at this stage in our development, some have more clues than others, but even after 12 months of work, there is a lot of producer and customer education that needs to be done. Enter Joel Salatin, one of America's most successful direct farm to customer producers. He has written a book about local food that is filled with passion and love. I have met him a couple of times, he spoke at a pasture meeting here in Oklahoma City and we were both at Terra Madre 2004 in Turin. But I can't say as how I have sat down and talked with him for any particular length of time, the way you do when you really get to know someone. Well, having read this book, I feel like I know him much better. He writes with a spirit of authenticity that is almost startling to behold in an era when the 30 second sound byte is the attention span of most folks. He covers both sides of the local food equation in his book. He speaks to farmers and customers, and by reading what he says, each side can learn about the other. If customers want to understand local food from a farmer's perspective, they can read what Joel says to the farmers. Ditto for farmers trying to grok how to sell directly to the public, they need to know about customers and so they can read what Joel says to the customers. He tells city people how they can tell if food is farm friendly, what to look for when they visit a farm, what questions to ask. He tells farmers how they should talk to customers, and calls both customers and farmers to a culture of respect for each other. His writing is very readable, the book is not a long polemic, but rather more like an extended conversation. He tells a lot of funny anecdotes, although some of them are kind of "funny-sad", especially when he talks about some of his interactions with government regulatory agencies