Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, listed for a few days in the left-hand column of the blog, has been one I can't put down. Pollan, a Marin county-dwelling, lefty, liberal guy, tracks three meals. The first is a McDonald's dinner which he undertook after an extensive study of the corn industry, a head-shaking look at the government's complicity in the overblown agricultural-industrial-petroleum scheme. The third meal is a hunted, foraged meal the author himself gets and makes. The second meal is the middle third of the book, and the most interesting and enjoyable. Pollan goes to live for a week with Joel Salatin on his farm, Polyface Farms, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Salatin, who happens to share my undergraduate alma mater, is a self-described "Christian-conservative-libertarian-enviromentalist-lunatic farmer." The author (Pollan) is as different from Salatin as night from day, but his admiration for Joel Salatin's methods and his stewardship of the land is undisguised. Polyface Farms, run by Salatin, his wife and two children, and two interns, consists of 550 acres: 450 wooded and 100 of pastureland. Salatin says he is a "grass farmer," even though he raises beef cattle, chickens, eggs, turkeys, rabbits, and pigs. He uses no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, no hormones, no antibiotics, and little heavy equipment, because he works hard to make his farm run like nature. The cattle are followed by the fowl, who "clean up," eating grubs, worms, and bugs, and scattering manure while grazing over the pastureland. Everything recycles to stay on the farm, and careful grazing management allows the maximum utilization of his grassland. Each year he produces 30,000 dozen eggs, 25,000 lbs of beef, 25,000 lbs of pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 800 stewing hens, 1,000 turkeys, and 500 rabbits, selling most to local consumers, restaurants (including Charlottesville and central Virginia's most upscale restaurants, like Metropolitain and the Ivy Inn), farmer's markets, and direct-order customers.

Expensive produce? Maybe, if you compare to $0.79/dozen eggs at the supermarket. Salatin, though, reminds anyone to factor in the "cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water" when we figure the "cost" of supermarket food, costs not incurred in his completely self-sufficient farm. Organic? Actually, not, but Salatin has little use for the USDA and its "Organic" imprimatur ("free-range" organic chickens can be in a 10,000-bird shed with a small strip of grass outside), but his farm is sustainable, perhaps a more important designation. This sets him apart from the "industrial organic" empires like Earthbound Farms and Whole Foods, which utilize the same nationwide, diesel-burning, factory-produced/preserved distribution systems as the mainstream food companies. They, of course, have their place, and their actions have arguably have eliminated more industrial fertilizers and pesticides from the soil of the USA than Polyface Farms has. Part of what caught Pollan's attention, though, was that Salatin wouldn't FedEx him a Polyface Farms steak cross-country. It is a local phenomenon, enriching its own place, in its own time, and can't be mass-scaled and shipped anywhere around the world. Check the book out (as did I, from the library); it's been an eye-opening look at the "food" we Americans eat.