Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

as other reviewers of Pollan have noted, Pollan gives an uncritical pass to his protagonist, Joel Saletin, in _The Omnivore’s Dilemma_. Saletin has some pretty reprehensible politics and Pollan largely lets him off the hook. If he scolds anyone it is the urbanite for hating on rural farmers like Saletin, rather than investigating Saletin’s belief that there is no need, really, for city folk at all. You could, you know, cut off the city of NY and Long Island and let it float out in the ocean, letting the rural upstate NYers unpestered by the burden of wacky city folk.

Anyway, I wrote a quick reaction to learning just how much I despised Saletin’s personal behavior. It was one thing to read Pollan’s book and notice that people, by and large, didn’t seem to be much of a focus in terms of the labor they engage in to produce food for others to eat. It’s there, but it’s not — and I’ll explore more later. It’s been a bee up my bonnet for a long time: the erasure of labor from so much of the save the dolphins rhetoric.

But when I found out that Pollan either ignored or didn’t care to think about the fact that Saletin is engaged in the super-exploitation of labor, all while railing against people who won’t pay designer prices for chicken, I was really annoyed. Saletin’s behavior doesn’t make the localvore movement wrong, of course. But it sure does make him an unlikely candidate for my supportive consumer dollars and it sure as shit makes me wonder about all the rest of the localvore movement farms out there and how they treat _their_ labor — and whether they even give a shit.

Meanwhile, here is my angry screed:

Pollan writes:

“Deciding whether that future should more closely resemble Joel’s radically local vision of Whole Foods’ industrial organizc matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities my require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside. … The important thing is that there be multiple food chians, so that when any one of them fails — when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work… we’ll still have a way to feed ourselves. It is because some of thos failures are already in view that the salesroom at Polyface Farm is buzzing with actvity this afternoon….

“An alternative food system is rising up on the margins, ” Joel continued. “One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has chaned. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren’t as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?”

Planning a trip to Polyface Farm last night, I learned why I’ll probably never bother to buy my meat and eggs there. Oh, I’m planning on going b/c I want to know whether the food actually tastes better — and pollan has convinced me that industrial organic food does not taste better.

What I learned at the web site is that, while Joel rails against the BMW drivers who would dare deny him a white collar salary (his term) when they complain about the price, but he hires 8 interns for the summer and apparently people as year-round interns - how many I’m not sure. Pay? $100/month plus room and board. In that area, a good income for a QA tester I personally know, is $45k. Joel’s paying people, oh, about $700/month for 4.3 x 50 hrs per week. $3.20/hr — giver or take.

You know what? Fuck that asshole and the rest of ‘em like him. He deserves a white collar income but apparently, these people do not.

Joel, of course, gets $3500/ session — whether an hour or a whole day, to pitch his stuff at non-profits, or $7000/session for for-profit businesses. Which is, well, you do the math: considerably fucking more. You could say, of course, that they get about what a worker in a supermarket might make. But as Pollan points out himself, with organic industrial farming, the workers aren’t treated any better than they are under other forms of farming. So, for me, why bother. I don’t get better taste, I don’t get better conditions for labor.

But with someone like Salatin (and I’m sure most other farmers like him think exactly the same) the hypocrisy is nauseating, and there’s nothing there to support. So much for community thinking if you can’t even pay the people that work for you the same wage you expect for yourself.

fuckheads.

really now.

oh, and the post’s title has to do with the way Joel Salatin (and Pollan unquestioningly ) expresses a politics of resentiment. yikes.