Patrick Donaldson, a Portland businessman whose daughter married one of Joel Salatin’s apprentices, coordinated a whirlwind three days of events featuring Joel in August. Joel spoke at the Urban Farm Store, a feed store in Portland that helped change zoning laws to allow small poultry flocks within city limits. Joel also spoke at Whole Foods, met with City Councilmen, television and radio personnel and Representative Wu. He gave a speech at a fundraiser benefiting Hollywood Farmers Market and OCFA. (I also spoke there.) On Saturday, Joel helped his former apprentice, Tyler Jones, with his first Field Day at Afton Field Farm. (Joel has been hosting annual field days at Polyface for years; if I remember right I met him at a 2001 field day before having the honor of working with him in VICFA.) If you have the chance to go to one of Joel’s or Tyler’s Field Days, do! You can easily justify the price of your ticket by learning few cost-cutting, labor saving tricks! Plus, lunch is always great!

Tyler’s Field Day included educational and farm goods booths. I manned the OCFA table. We enjoyed learning about the hoop house for layers, the portable broiler pens, the pigs living in the woods and the pasture Tyler leased to a cattle owner. The highlight was the poultry processing house, which had caused some consternation among “food safety” inspectors. When the “experts” told Tyler he must have walls all around, Tyler included many floor to ceiling glass patio doors that could be opened to let fresh air in. In order to transform them from doors into windows, he raised them off the floor. Joel talked about the building with obvious glee; Tyler had WON! Joel discussed regulations, which could be interpreted differently by every inspector, and the onerous food safety bills in the House and Senate.

In addition to orchestrating these events, Patrick made a generous donation to a local printer once he heard I’d been paying for OCFA’s printing costs myself. Patrick is a good man. If you ever meet him, shake his hand!

Guest Columnist Joel Salatin's Essay Legalized Drugs Necessary to Keep Food Choice

Food choice is ultimately about who gets to determine what can pass from my lips to my stomach. When that decision is made by government, I call that an invasion of privacy. Each layer of personal autonomy that we remove inevitably leads to other arenas of liberty deprivation. After all, if the government has the authority to decide what I can feed my 3 trillion internal flora and fauna community, it certainly has the same authority in other areas.

Americans have an historical precedent which demonstrates the broad effects of such intrusion into personal autonomy: prohibition. That decade-long love affair with foolishness destroyed the imbedded alcohol infrastructure in communities all across the nation. In the early 1900s, alcohol served many functions: fuel, antiseptic, preservative, and sedative. It was also a way to ship fruit nutrition in a time before refrigeration and efficient transportation. Apple brandy was Johnny Appleseed's goal, not apple pie. Because alcohol was ubiquitous in the culture, Henry Ford made the Model T with two buttons on the dashboard to regulate the carburetion depending on whether the engine burned gasoline or alcohol.

The prohibition received substantial support from John D. Rockefeller, a teetotaling Presbyterian. Rockefeller threw his significant financial and personal capital behind the prohibition movement and it thrived. Although it only existed a few years, that was long enough to destroy the alternative fuel system… and remove that pesky alternative carburetor button on the automobile dashboard. I can’t help but wonder what our energy situation would be today if all the imbedded decentralized community-scaled alcohol production expertise and infrastructure had not been destroyed a century ago.

Here we are a century later, still suffering from the invasive, albeit relatively short lived, prohibition era. Which brings us to the modern prohibition - the drug war. A government with the authority to tell me I can’t smoke dope or take an alternative medical treatment certainly has the authority to tell me I can’t ingest raw milk or compost grown tomatoes.

Righteous indignation is a powerful force. Before unleashing it on any policy, we need to make sure we’re not paving the road to hell with good intentions. I think the drug war is exactly that kind of misguided indignation. As a culture, we haven’t thought through the ramifications of drug prohibition, any more than the indignant folks thought through the ramifications of alcohol prohibition a century ago.

I may be wrong, but I believe we will not secure freedom of food choice until we chip away at the assumption that denying personal drug autonomy - for enjoyment, self-destruction, or medical reasons - is within the government’s purview. Our culture, far removed from the limited government authority envisioned by the Constitution, rarely questions the role of government to reach into my mouth or my stomach. If we want something to be indignant about, that intrusion well qualifies.

To think that we can encourage the government to reach into our mouths on Monday to extract snake oil or meth without having it extract raw milk and home-kitchen-made cheese on Friday is to practice intellectual schizophrenia. The more consistent our argument is, the stronger it will be.