Food Emancipation: Unshackling America’s Sustenance, by Joel Salatin
Great books often have great first sentences, but those opening lines are seldom a concise summary of the entire story. Not so in this case — one need look no further than the first sentence of the introduction to Joel Salatin’s new book to get his main point: “America’s food and farm system is enslaved by a labyrinth of regulatory licenses to prohibit buyers and sellers from exercising food choice.”
It’s no “Call me Ishmael” — and perhaps this is not destined to become a classic — but it certainly gives the reader the gist of where Salatin is going.
Of course, the title and subtitle do that too: Food Emancipation: Unshackling America’s Sustenance. Salatin argues that government interference is at the root of our unhealthy food supply and struggling farm economics. Regulations and laws do little to actually protect us from unsafe food, but they do keep people who want to farm from doing so and thus prevent more people from stewarding the land.
This book is a great and entertaining read. It deserves to be examined, even if you don’t share Salatin’s underlying presuppositions.
Perhaps shocking to some will be Salatin’s insistence that it’s government interference qua government interference that’s the problem. While some argue that we need government to stop subsidizing conventional row crops and instead support small-scale and organic/regenerative farms, Salatin points out that this would keep the shackles on just as tightly — simply in a different form. This is Hayek’s knowledge problem. No humans — even driven by AI — can adequately predict how market forces will work. Putting a thumb down somewhere produces innumerable butterfly effects in other places, and that means less freedom and less thriving. The solution is to remove the thumb, period.
One note of caution to the reader is to be careful in examining what Salatin is and isn’t saying about the cause of the problem. There’s perhaps a little bit of a disconnect between, for example, the foreword, written by Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute, and Salatin. Tucker describes some sort of malignant force behind what’s happening to us. “[A]n entire way of life — a way toward health, well-being, and happiness — has been stolen from us. Not neglected, not outcompeted, but literally forced out of existence. This happened not by market forces as such, not by some impersonal mind of history, but by a labyrinth of regulations, mandates, taxes, controls, subsidies, and monopoly-creating controls, all conspiring to keep the way of life of our ancestors from returning.”
Yet a few pages later, in the introduction, Salatin clarifies this: “Nobody conspired to make this happen…. The American people let it happen and, unfortunately, wanted it to happen. We citizens enslaved our food system through the policies we asked our legislators to pass.” So, yes, there is a conspiracy, but all of us are the culprits. In not electing serious, wise legislators, we have put ourselves in this position, with food that lacks nutrition and farmers who have a hard time making a living.
One possible quibble with the book is the degree to which the problems of modern American agriculture are the result of technological development — could that be just as much of a factor as government overreach — or even more of one? Do we no longer have strong, agrarian communities because of corporations and legislators, or because of new inventions? Former Senator Ben Sasse often talks about how he believes people 100 years from now will look back at this moment and recognize that the digital/AI revolution we’re currently undergoing was far more transformative than any political or cultural shift — even considering the whirlwind of the past decade. One could similarly argue that the printing press, the steam engine, and the first computers were far more significant than any political or cultural movement in those same time periods.
In this vein, perhaps the reason we have less good land stewardship today is more because of the tractor and the combine than because of Earl Butz — more Haber-Bosch and CRISPR than any farm bill. But while the policies of Earl Butz and any given farm bill could conceivably be shaped/transformed, technology just happens. It isn’t a conspiracy that is stealing anything from us, and there’s no putting it back in the bottle. Perhaps, then, transforming American agriculture is just as much about using the technology we’ve been given in ways that are ecologically sensible as about eliminating suffocating regulations. Salatin does acknowledge this possibility — for example, he notes that AI might be able to “unseat the entrenched Wall Street royalty,” and he praises technologies like Uber that allow individuals to provide services once the exclusive domain of large corporations.
But the basic message of this book is nevertheless spot-on, even if it is not a truth universally acknowledged: that we can make farming thrive again if we give freedom a chance.
