Epoch Times - Joel Salatin: The Hidden War on Small-Scale Food Producers
Aired: 2025-04-09
Duration: 07:32


=== Regulating Neighborly Food Commerce (07:26) ===

[00:00:00]  There's been an incremental move by government regulatory agents to criminalize and prohibit direct neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce.
[00:00:13]  All right?
[00:00:14]  So let me give you an example.
[00:00:15]  So we have a lady in our church.
[00:00:17]  We all call her Aunt Grace.
[00:00:19]  We love this lady.
[00:00:19]  She's got a big garden, some chickens, and she loves cooking.
[00:00:24]  And so at every church potluck, she brings a chicken pot pie.
[00:00:29]  It's the first thing gone at every buffet.
[00:00:32]  And we all love her to death.
[00:00:34]  So we want to go to Aunt Grace to say, would you cook a couple of these pot pies that we love so dearly?
[00:00:40]  We'll pay you 20 bucks or whatever you say.
[00:00:42]  A piece?
[00:00:43]  No. That's illegal.
[00:00:45]  It's illegal for her.
[00:00:47]  To make a pot pie for us.
[00:00:49]  To feed our guests.
[00:00:51]  Now, that's wrong.
[00:00:54]  We should be able to engage in a freedom of choice as consenting adults transaction with Aunt Grace without a government agent in between that.
[00:01:12]  I'm not suggesting that she should be free to, you know, whatever.
[00:01:16]  You know, sell them to Sri Lanka or put them in Walmart or Costco, okay?
[00:01:20]  But I am suggesting that neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, we should be able to engage in a consensual, and I'm using powerful words because it's important to understand in our country right now,
[00:01:37]  we love freedom of choice.
[00:01:38]  We have choice in the bathroom, choice in the bedroom, choice in the womb, but no choice in the kitchen.
[00:01:44]  And people say, well, I go to Walmart, look at all the choice I have.
[00:01:48]  Yeah, but that's a very narrow funnel.
[00:01:50]  All that food comes through an industrial funnel with a bureaucrat oversight that doesn't allow for the kind of localized, customized, non-MSG ingredients.
[00:02:04]  Right now, for example, we shoot several deer every year, deer season.
[00:02:08]  We can take these deer up.
[00:02:10]  There's an Amish Mennonite outfit near us, and we can take that deer up, add a little bit of pork to it, and they can make, it is the best summer sausage.
[00:02:21]  I mean, I could live on this.
[00:02:22]  I could just live on this the rest of my life.
[00:02:25]  Best summer sausage in the world, but they can't do one pound of beef because it's illegal.
[00:02:32]  They can do a million pounds of venison because that's not in commerce.
[00:02:39]  But because beef is a commercial product, they can't do beef.
[00:02:43]  So what we have right now, we have many people that are wanting clean food, safe food, stable, secure food from their neighbors and can't get it.
[00:03:02]  Because of prohibitive regulatory infrastructure and paperwork requirements, we have farmers desperate to be able to get a retail dollar to stay in business.
[00:03:17]  They can't sell it.
[00:03:20]  And we have a rural-urban divide that desperately needs the connectivity.
[00:03:29]  of direct food commerce to occur.
[00:03:32]  And so the idea of a food emancipation proclamation to be able to unfetter, unshackle, and de-enslave our food system to this federal, bureaucratic,
[00:03:48]  regulatory intervention so that you and I can engage in a transaction voluntarily.
[00:03:57]  To choose our fuel for our microbiome so we can choose our fuel to go shoot, pray, and preach.
[00:04:06]  I mean, those are guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights, but what good is it to have the freedom to go shoot, pray, preach, and assemble if I can't choose my body's fuel to give me the energy to go do these things?
[00:04:17]  And so food, the ability to transact a food interaction, Without a bureaucrat involved is, I think,
[00:04:32]  it's foundational to solving multiple threads.
[00:04:37]  The rural economy, entrepreneurial agriculture, food choice, food stability, all those things happen when we de-enslave.
[00:04:53]  See, in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, Seven companies controlled 50% of America's meat supply.
[00:05:02]  Today, four companies control 85%.
[00:05:06]  That's how much centralization and concentration there is in the food industry, which we saw manifested in 2020 when store shelves went empty.
[00:05:15]  I mean, just think about it.
[00:05:16]  If we had had 300,000 Neighborhood, community, processing facilities, you know, abattoirs functioning instead of 3,000 mega facilities.
[00:05:29]  Would we have had as big a hiccup in 2020?
[00:05:31]  Of course not.
[00:05:32]  Another element of this in our country, hazardous substances are controlled on all levels.
[00:05:42]  The buyer, the seller, and the user.
[00:05:45]  In other words, I can't...
[00:05:48]  I can't use fentanyl.
[00:05:50]  I can't use methamphetamine.
[00:05:54]  Prescription drugs, I can't buy them.
[00:05:57]  I can't sell them.
[00:05:58]  I can't use them without a prescription.
[00:06:01]  So you have this pretty broad umbrella over these hazardous things.
[00:06:08]  But in food, it's only on the seller.
[00:06:14]  I can give you raw milk.
[00:06:17]  I can give you homemade charcuterie, bologna, and my chicken pot pie.
[00:06:21]  She could give these to me.
[00:06:25]  And I can feed them to my children.
[00:06:29]  In fact, I can even buy them if she's willing to be a criminal and sell them.
[00:06:36]  So there's no prohibition on buying it.
[00:06:41]  There's no prohibition on using it.
[00:06:43]  And no prohibition on feeding it to my children.
[00:06:46]  The only prohibition is on selling it.
[00:06:50]  So if it's really that hazardous, if raw milk is really that hazardous, if Aunt Grace's pot pie is really that hazardous, she shouldn't be able to give it away, I shouldn't be able to eat it, and I certainly shouldn't be able to feed it to my children.
[00:07:05]  This shows the great hypocrisy, the inconsistency of these food police that they're only taking The prohibitory side against the seller and not any other user.

=== Regulating Market Access (00:21) ===

[00:07:20]  So is it really?
[00:07:21]  Is it really dangerous?
[00:07:23]  No, it's not dangerous.
[00:07:26]  This is about regulating market access.
[00:07:30]  It's not about protecting people.