Farmer and author Joel Salatin has challenged many aspects of the way America produces its food, putting his ideas about sustainable land management and humane raising of meat and poultry in books such as Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (Center Street, 2011). In his newest book, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation (FaithWords, May), the owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley describes how his views on food and farming are based in his Christian faith.
This is your 10th book but your first specifically aimed at Christians. Why did you decide to write it?
Because all my life I’ve been living in this tension, this world between the conservative faith community and the, should I say, liberal environmental community, in fact so much so that in recent years I’ve taken on the moniker as a self-described Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer in order to break down that you have to be one or the other. I feel very comfortable in both camps, so this is an attempt to challenge my conservative Christian faith-based friends with what I consider the Judeo-Christian mandates, the ethic of creation and environmental stewardship. Since I am [a Christian] I can speak the language. The idea is to synchronize what is embraced in the pew with what you see on the menu.
What is the pigness of pigs?
The pigness of pigs speaks to the inherent respect and honor bestowed on life. We don’t say things like respect the Legoness of a Lego. A Lego doesn’t have any thought or life or individuality of itself, it’s simply an inanimate particle like a piece of furniture, a chair, or whatever, whereas life, pigs and tomatoes and onions, do have life, there is a sacredness to their formation—God made them. The whole conundrum of the book is to touch people deeply with the connectedness of things. One of the biggest challenges I have every day is waking up trying to think it’s all connected, because we as Westerners don’t think that way. So it does matter if we appreciate the pigness of the pig. If the pig is just an inanimate pile of protoplasmic evolutionary matter, then that worldview shows itself in our thinking toward all of life, even toward each other. It starts with the least of these and moves up the chain if you will, the philosophical chain, to the greatest of these, which is of course you and I.
What part of your book’s message do you think Christian communities may find most challenging?
That the food we eat is an image of our spiritual world view. And so if the food that we’re patronizing speaks of industrial, mechanical life, hubris, greed, manipulation, lack of respect, lack of honor for the pigness of the pig, for example, well then, we have a decision. That chicken on the plate, that pork chop, that tomato, that onion, does it truly represent our moral imperatives? And if it doesn’t, does that mean I have to shop somewhere other than the supermarket or should I think about even working [at] a different place? These are going to be the big issues.
How would you like to see churches incorporating Biblically based principles about land management and food production?
First of all, churches need to actually wrestle with questions like, should we use Styrofoam plates for the potluck or should we use paper or maybe go to the Salvation Army and buy a bunch of secondhand china plates and just wash them. My first goal in the book is to broach the topic in a way that hopefully church groups will be able to just simply have a conversation internally about these things. The second thing is that throughout the book there are numerous specific visceral ideas to leverage the familial and organizational power of the congregation. For example, what if instead of [donating] dented canned food to the food bank, the church opened up half of its lawn acreage for community gardens so that folks could grow their own food? How about adopting nearby farmers as the food suppliers and essentially offering the church as a big glorified point for a modified food hub—a CSA (community-supported agriculture)? How about taking the youth group on a trip to chop thistles on a neighbor’s farm instead of going to Six Flags? It's easy to go talk about platitudes and neighborliness, neatness, humility, faith, and heavenliness and all that cloistered in a fellowship hall; it's quite another to ask ourselves what do those things look like when I get up in the morning in my own home and in my own community.