Join the Integrity Food Movement!

For Your Health and the Health of Your

Children
Author: Joel Salatin
The contents of this presentation are for informational purposes only and are not
intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any
questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
We live in a time when food gets short shrift. The
historical repast has turned into a lap-meal between
stoplights. How we view food indicates the respect we
have to our bodies specifically and the earth
generally. Food is body fuel, just like gas is car
fuel. Would you put gas-like substances in your
car? Why would we put food-like substances in our
bodies?
Junky fuel makes a car run bad. Junky food makes a
body run bad. What is junky food? Many people have tried to define it, so I'll borrow
some of the most common threads and weave them into a practical litmus test.
1. Unpronounceable ingredients. If you can't say it, you probably shouldn't eat it. Isn't
that simple enough? Humans have never eaten laboratory concoctions until extremely
recent decades. The food dyes, stabilizers, flavor enhancers brewed up in laboratories
instead of kitchens have no place in the human diet. If the food-like substance
emanates from something that looks more like a Dow Chemical laboratory than your
home kitchen, it'll probably clog your system and shut down your engine.
2. Broad ingredients, like natural flavors or artificial sweeteners. This includes
substitutions for the real thing, like Aspartame rather than cane sugar. If it has cloves,
why can't they say cloves? The point is that whenever a food has to include non-food
broad items, you can be sure those are non-food enhancers foreign to your intestinal
micro-flora and fauna.
3. Anything not available before 1900. This is one of Michael Pollan's rules, and it's
probably pretty good. Dolly Madison and Martha Jefferson used a host of foods most
people have never heard of today. From chokecherries to currants, our ancestors ate a
2014 Lotus Health Project. All rights reserved.

far larger variety of food than most moderns. The supermarket

today is primarily a four-color cardboard sales pitch to eat corn
and soybeans in a lot of different ways. We can all be thankful
that hot dogs were introduced at the 1890 world's fairthey
just slipped in under the radar.
4. Anything advertised on TV. If the company and food item
are big enough to pay for TV advertising, you can be sure that it's merely a food-like
substance that's more junk than real. The smart thing is to stay away from anything
advertised on TV. This is far easier if you're like me and don't have a TV. Especially for
your kids. Who needs it? Get them in the kitchen whipping up dinner with you.
5. If it won't rot. If you put food out on the counter at ambient temperature and it's
stable when under natural conditions it would spoil, don't indulge. That includes organic
ultra-pasteurized milk that's shelf-stable (no refrigeration required) for up to six
months. Folks, that ain't normal. You can squirt Velveeta cheese on a plate and leave it
in the dining room table for months. It won't mold, desiccate, liquefy or smell bad. If
you put real living cheese on a plate and leave it at room temperature, within a day or
two it'll sprout fuzzy mold and within a week, sprout legs and walk off the table. It's
going places. If food won't rot, it won't decompose, and digestion is decomposition just
like a compost pile.

You can't be a bystander and expect life to take care of you.

6. If it honors the pigness of pigs. This is a broad ranging idea, but it speaks to
biological and environmental integrity. If the food doesn't build soil and honor the
physiological distinctiveness of life, it cheapens eating to an act of desecration rather
than reverence. This means you have to do some sleuthing. If the government thinks
the food is great, it's probably taken environmental or ethical shortcuts to get to your
plate. This rules out meat, dairy and poultry grown in unnatural conditions like
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). It rules out genetically modified
foods that represent the pinnacle of hubris toward life. It rules out chemical fertilizers
that destroy soil, pesticides, herbicides and anything that aids and abets the New
Jersey-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

2014 Lotus Health Project. All rights reserved.

In general, you want whole, unprocessed foods that you prepare, package, preserve,
and process in your own kitchen from sources you've vetted either by third party
association or personally. Yes, this takes a bit of participation. You can't be a bystander
and expect life to take care of you. You have to become an active participant in some
visceral element of life. Obviously not every morsel can or will pass these tests.
Goodness, I enjoy a Snickers Bar about twice a year, too. But in the main, these are
the ideas that will put you into the clean body fuel business.
You see, in the end food defines our view of earth stewardship. Riparian dead zones,
effluent spills from CAFOs, and poisoned children in tomato fields are a direct result of
how we choose to eat. When we patronize a system that assaults our ecological womb
as egregiously as factory-farmed, chemical-based food, we're are guilty accomplices in
hurting the earth and our own bodies.
This means we have to think ahead. Here are some ideas to help us eat with
conscience.
1. Take all the entertainment/recreational time and money budgeted for one year and
spend it on treasure hunting your local integrity food providers. Every area is
surrounded by integrity farmers and food purveyors, but they are literally a
subculture. You have to join their tribe, enter their subculture, and a whole host of
nutrient-dense integrity food will become available.
2. Develop domestic culinary arts. Most moderns are
far removed from some of the most basic culinary skills,
like how to cut up a chicken or prepare a butternut
squash. "Get in the kitchen" sounds like banishment to
remote island exile. Rather, it should be a wake up call
for what we've lost. No civilization deserves or enjoys
integrity food when its people mass-exit personal
awareness and responsibility toward food. We fear
what we don't know; participating is the way to be
informed and therefore comfortable with food.
3. Techno-gadgetize your kitchen to make the job easier. What could possibly be easier
than a slow cooker or crock pot? Teresa and I give them out as wedding gifts. I can't
fathom how many households do not have a slow cooker. It's the quickest and easiest
way to prepare a meal. Grab a steak or roast, throw in some potatoes, onions and
2014 Lotus Health Project. All rights reserved.

carrots, and plug it in on your way out the door. At 40 watts it bubbles along all day
using half the energy of a light bulb, and if you come home at 5:00, dinner's ready; at
8:00, dinner's ready. Never burned and always just right. Bread makers, ice cream
makers, Cuisinarts, timed bake. Today's kitchen is not a place of drudgery; it's a place
of space age convenience. Enjoy it.
4. Cultivate leftovers. A thermos with hot stew is far cheaper and nutritious than fast
food. At our home, we never cook luncheven though as a farmer I work from
home. It takes too much time. A slice of cheese and an apple is just fine if we don't
have leftovers. But usually I can find some leftover lasagna or casserole. The fact that
the industrial food system now sells individual servings of things shows how seldom
people sit down and eat together but also indicates a disdain for leftovers.
Ultimately, we cannot have physical health if we don't have planetary health. We can't
have planetary health until we start eating in a way that heals our landscape
nest. Figuring out how to grow food in a way that heals the ecology and stimulates
nutrition must captivate our creativity and vocation. Here are some ideas for getting
that done.
1. Grow something yourself. I'm a huge
fan of kitchen chickens. Get rid of the
cat, dog, gerbil and boa constrictor. Two
chickens are far more enjoyable and
functional. They eat all your kitchen
scraps and gratefully give you eggs for
their work. How about that? And talk
about a role model for children. They get
up early, happily work all day, turn scraps
into usefulness, and then go to bed real
early with no desire to run around at
night. A dog and cat just sit around
waiting for you to take care of
them. That's a horrible role model for kids. Chickens are the real deal. How about pot
gardensgrowing food in pots? What were you thinking? Ha! Lots of innovation has
gone into urban food growing. Enjoy it. Edible landscaping. The U.S. has 26 million
acres of lawn. Certainly a portion of that could be turned into edible production. How
about a beehive on the roof? Grow your own honey.

2014 Lotus Health Project. All rights reserved.

2. Find your farmer. Realize that knowing

your food is at least as important as
registering the kiddos for the soccer
league. Wouldn't it be nice if we could live
with integrity without having to think about
it? But everything worth doing requires
effort. And change requires, well,
change. You can't keep doing the same things
and expect different results. Many integrity
food producers are desperate for just a few
more customers who will push them over the
profitability edge and let them quit the commute to the town job to support their farm
habit. Wake up and appreciate that you have the distinct privilege and honor to enable
one of these struggling integrity farmers to succeed. That's real ministry.
3. Buy in bulk and in season. You can save a lot of shopping time and grocery money
by buying volumes, whether it's bushels of beans and canning them or half a beef and
putting it in your freezer. Don't have one big enough? Throw out the entertainment
center and put in a freezer. It'll take less energy and be far more enjoyable in the long
run. I know this is radical stuff, but, folks, integrity takes radical action. It doesn't
come naturally. We love quick fixes, short cuts, and something for nothing. But none of
this ultimately works. When will we be radical enough to change our state of
affairs? Amazingly, what I'm suggesting is the way everyone lived by default not very
long ago. It's actually much more historically normal than the supermarket with skunumbered microwaveable packets of food-like substances.
What do you say? Shall we join the integrity food movement? Is it worth it? These are
rhetorical questions, by the way. Together, we can embrace our ecological nest, both
inside us and outside us, and caress this awesome biological reality--life. Let's do it
together.

2014 Lotus Health Project. All rights reserved.