The Food Emancipation Proclamation

The operative word of our time is disentanglement. How many people do we run into that say, I just want to disentangle. I don’t want to feel dependent on the education system. So we have a tsunami of homeschooling.

I don’t want to be dependent on the healthcare system. So we have a tsunami of medical quacks, many of them speaking here. We all want to go to a quack these days. Absolutely. All right. Financially, we’re all concerned. Where’s the money going? So 401(k) plans are being converted into living, moving, and knowing. 

Proximate to investing in how to grow things, fix things, and build things. And if you know how to grow, build, and fix, or live next to people who do that, it is better than any 401(k) plan. That is disentanglement. 

Entertainment. Entertainment. Many people are now ditching the entertainment money and investing it in information like this. I’d rather come here for this weekend than a Caribbean cruise. Which is more valuable? So this disentangled news, disentangled from the news. So what we’re doing…Substack and podcasts and we’ve kissed mainstream media goodbye. I don’t want to be disentangled with that.

And food. Food we’re realizing every day and really gaining momentum through the efforts of RFK, Jr. and MAHA, how inauthentic and unacceptable our food supply is. I mean, think of what he’s brought to the discussion. How many of us knew five months ago that $15 billion a year of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) benefits went to Coca-Cola? I didn’t know that. Most of us didn’t, but that’s now part of the national conversation. And so we’re seeing this desire to disentangle from the system on multiple levels. 

I’ll concentrate on food just because that’s what I’m going to talk about. I know more about that than the others, but the others, it’s happening over and over, and this is driving now a homestead tsunami. Thirty years ago, 80% of the visitors here at our farm were lefty greeny, earth muffin, tree hugger, liberal environmental, wackys. Today, 80% of our visitors are conservative, faith-based, right-sided. Wackos. The desire has turned; the desire has turned from “Government, solve all my problems” to self-reliance and resilience. That’s what the homestead economy is all about. In food. 

I don’t trust Procter and Gamble. 

I don’t trust Nestle’s. 

I don’t trust Hershey’s. 

Basically, when they shut down the tobacco companies, all of that laboratory and scientific chemical knowledge got scarfed up by the big food companies and the tobacco experts are formulating our food, and that’s why we now have – what is it – 70,000 food additives that are unpronounceable. The European Union only has 400, and so the whole ultra-processed food thing has come down to us. So I want to know what’s in the pantry. I want to know what’s on the table for my kiddos. Think about our children. Our children from a homestead situation. We now know that how we build an immune system is eating dirt, playing in the dirt, getting dirt under our fingernails.

Finland leads the world in the scientific studies showing farm kids who eat some poop when they’re toddlers are far more immunologically vibrant than their city cousins who live in a sterile environment. So if anybody’s looking for a million-dollar entrepreneurial idea here, it’s funny, but I’m dead serious. What we need is for somebody to start a subscription program for welcome mats that are permeable, that are filled with compost and soil from farms so that city subscribers can get their welcome bladder, not physical bladder, but their welcome mat bladder settled and get their immune system going. 

Self-worth. We have a teenage suicide problem. Big problem. How do you develop self-worth? I’m not a psychologist, but here’s my farm boy definition of how a kid develops self-worth. It is when you successfully accomplish meaningful tasks. When you successfully accomplish meaningful tasks. All four of those words are important. 

You don’t get self-worth by being the top points-getter on Angry Birds.

You get it by knowing how to gut a chicken. Can a can of green beans, grow a corn, grow a tomato plant, those kinds of things, gather eggs. And so self-worth comes from a homestead where children can do chores, develop harmony in the workplace. You sit together and [talk about] “How are we going to put this post in? How are we going to fix this fence? How are we going to get the cows in when they get out?” Those kinds of things. 

Developing children. It doesn’t do better than on a homestead. And so parents are seeing this and they’re seeing the dysfunction in our young people and looking at homesteads as a way of moving their families forward. And so fearing the dysfunction of the urban sector, they’re running out of the urban sector to the country. Fear makes us run.

Faith makes us stop. You can’t run forever. Fear’s a good thing if you’re being chased by the lion. Fear’s a good thing. You probably need to be running, but you can’t run forever. And so someplace you need to stop. And that’s where people are stopping at these homesteads. 

So how do we disentangle from the industrial food farm complex? We grow it ourselves or we buy it outside the system. But here’s the problem. If we start down that path, we realize that the ability to exchange food is so heavily regulated, we have very little choice. If one of you wanted to come to me and say, wow, that chicken was great yesterday. Could you sell me one of those barbecued halves of chicken? I can’t legally sell it to you because that’s a cooked product and it can only come from an inspected kitchen.

If you said, I want to buy a can of your homemade canned tomato soup, I can’t sell it to you. The current system only allows availability in the marketplace from the industrial choice. If you ever notice a food recall, they’ll put down the brands that are being recalled. There are 25 brands, they’re all coming from the same tube. People walk into Walmart and they say, “Well, what do you mean we don’t have food choice? Look at all the brands, all the colored labels.” 

Well, they’re all industrial. So what we want, what the society, the culture is yearning for right now. Buyers want affordable, unadulterated food. You can’t get that at the supermarket. 

Old farmers need a way to get out. We talked about that on the tour. Young farmers need a way to get in and inner city food deserts need a solution besides the food bank.

So in the last 80 years, the farmer’s portion of the retail dollar has dropped from 50% to 8%. That means we could have a new farm policy tomorrow. That said, from now on, farmers work for free. They don’t get paid anything, and it will only change the price of food [by] 8%. Ninety-two percent goes to the middleman. Processing, marketing, and distribution. Much of that change is due to convenience buying. 

The biggest mistake I ever made when I first started doing media interviews 30 years ago and we got some traction… “Where do you see the food system going in the future?” Well, Michelle Obama had the White House garden, “Know your farmer, know your food.” We were all ecstatic. We thought, oh, surely in a few years we’re all going to be in our kitchens. We’re going to be making our food, we’re going to be buying whole foods, squash and tomatoes, and we’re going to be canning and practicing culinary domestic arts.

But instead, we got Hot Pockets and we got ultra-processed food. And Lunchables. Convenience is here to stay. That horse has left the stable. And so one of the epiphanies I’ve had, literally in the last couple months, is to realize I got to quit harping on domestic culinary arts. It’s gone. Seventy-five percent of all food Americans eat is convenience food. In fact, 25% is eaten in automobiles. We are that far divorced from a connection to our ecological womb. And what happens is, when you start getting generationally divorced from knowledge, you become paranoid about that thing.

It’s not just, “I don’t know how to cook from scratch,” it’s that “I’m scared to cook from scratch.” And so convenience is here to stay, but it’s become controlled by the industrial food system, the ultra-process system. Things you can’t make in your kitchen that you can only make in a laboratory. But there’s no reason for convenience food to have monosodium glutamate in it, red dye 29 or any of the other 70,000 additives that are put in the food to stabilize it and give bland junk factory food a taste.

So the farmers need access to the retail dollar. The farmers desperately need to move our 8% portion up to a higher percentage point, jump into those middleman profits to create a viable economic way to make a living as a farmer. But value-adding the processing is prejudicially scale-regulated. It’s much easier to comply with government regulations if you’re larger than if you’re small. 

Theresa and I co-own a small federal-inspected slaughterhouse up in Harrisonburg. It costs us $500 to do what Tyson does with $100. And then people say, well, you’re an elitist because your price is so high. No, it’s because we have exactly the same HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Plan) plans, bathrooms, offices for government inspectors doing a hundred animals a week as Tyson does, doing 5,000 a day. And that is inherently unjust and unfair and unnecessary. So what this does is that it elevates the cost of entry.

Did you like that chicken yesterday? Yeah. Yeah. In order for me to offer you a chicken pot pie, I have to have an inspected kitchen, a HACCP plan, hazardous analysis and critical control point plan, and there’s no template for making these. And if you take the template off the inspection service website, they will automatically cast it out.

I have to have a licensed bathroom, not a composting toilet, and it doesn’t matter that our kitchen is a hundred yards from two [bathrooms] in our house, two in mom’s house. It has to be on site, a licensed leach field for that bathroom and a certified cold chain with 24/7 thermometer, computer microchip reading. 

That’s just to get you a chicken pot pie. So when we started to do this, we asked, we wanted to do chicken pot pies because our customers would love Polyface chicken pot pies, heat and eat, put ’em in a cardboard box, freeze ’em, no MSG, no vaccines, no GMOs. I mean, they’re to die for. I happen to love chicken pot pie. So when the inspector came out and told me all these things that I had to have, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. I was just over in Charlottesville and there was a food truck selling chicken pot pies out of a food truck. He doesn’t have licensed bathroom leach fields, all this stuff. He said, yeah, you’re right. That’s one of the loopholes we’re trying to close. 

So if you see bathrooms hooked to the back of food trucks, you’ll know where it came from. I said, wait a minute. Are you telling me that if instead of having a stationary kitchen if I put it on a chassis? He said, absolutely. But here’s the problem. A food truck can only sell from a food truck. You can’t ship it. You can’t take it offsite and sell it. So now you’re limited to just the window of the food truck.

So they’ve got you going and coming. So what’s happened in the last couple of years is a plethora of workarounds from farmers in the farm space. The current solutions on the farmer end have been numerous. 

One is a private membership association – a PMA. Many of you are familiar with that. These were started in 1965 after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and white country clubs in Georgia didn’t want blacks to attend their country club. So they tried to figure out how to get around the Civil Rights Act and said, well, we’ll just become a private non-public association and [they] developed the private membership association. Some clever people have now said, well, let’s do that for the food laws and start a non-public arrangement for transactions.

These are [happening] right now. There are some that have been successful, others that haven’t been discovered, others that you’ve read about, like Amos Miller in Pennsylvania. Right now, there’s a cease and desist order on one in Dayton. There’s one in Virginia. We’re going to court on September 22 (next Monday) in Virginia for one. 

Essentially when you do a PMA right now in America, you’ve just painted a big target on your back because when you thumb your nose at these big government agencies, they don’t like it. They really don’t like it. And so private membership associations have been testy and problematic. 

Another one, of course in the dairy end is herd share. Many of you’re familiar with herd share. It’s illegal to sell raw milk in Virginia, but we have a herd share with the dairy up the road that you’re getting the chocolate milk from in the store. If you haven’t had any of that chocolate milk, you need to get it because it’s serious, but a herd share. Okay? So I’m going down next month to North Carolina to a rally where they’re trying to outlaw herd shares in North Carolina. And by the way, this is being led by Republicans who are in bed with big business.

But the problem with herd share is that it’s clunky. It’s clunky. So we get a gallon of milk a week. When I’m gone, we don’t drink a gallon of milk a week. If we have visitors, we can’t get an extra gallon to feed our visitors. And so it’s very, very clunky. Another one is pet food. Florida has led the states right now in having the most relaxed pet food ordinances. So you can basically register virtually anything in Florida as pet food for a $25 license fee, and you can sell it as pet food, not for human consumption.

There is a lot of pressure right now. When they do it for one. And okay, let’s just get that one done and out of sight out of mind, and then when 30 and 40 and 50 [businesses do it], now it’s not acceptable anymore. So they’re trying to close that loophole and I think will succeed. 

Another one is with the internet, you can sell a course like on butchery or cheese-making and give away course materials. So there are people selling butchery courses, and with the price of taking the internet butchery course, you get $200 worth of free meat. Okay, well, I process it and give it away. So you can give this stuff away. You just can’t – it can’t enter commerce. So these are workarounds that this yearning of buyers to opt out of Walmart and farmers to engage in the retail dollar in our whatever tribe. These are all workarounds that are being invested in by good legal minds, sharp people that are trying to work around this hurdle of my being able to get you a chicken pot pie.

Now, what concerns me is that the current agenda from MAHA doesn’t address any of this. The current agenda from MAHA is, “Well, let’s transfer the money from commodity subsidies to farmers that are trying to transition to organic.” So we’ll take money from this pot and we’ll put that money in that pot. I’m sure we can trust the administrators to do that perfectly. 

Another big one is let’s outlaw Topamine. Glyphosate factory farming. Name your demon. Let’s outlaw that. 

Another one is, let’s move SNAP funds – Coca-Cola funds to whole food. People can only buy whole foods. Basically what I see – and I’m a friend of MAHA, I’m not here to bedevil MAHA – but my concern is we’re on this way. We’ve got this window of opportunity and it’s going to be squandered and little tricks do this, do that, do the other. And there’s not a universally sweeping laser-focused objective that has multiple threads solving multiple problems, and they’re still basically government-oriented. 

We’re still asking for salvation by legislation. We basically either trade money or we outlaw something. That’s basically the agenda. How did we get here? How did we get to this point? 

We got here in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and he exposed the atrocities in the slaughterhouses of Chicago and the seven large meat packers. There were seven of them at the time that controlled 50% of America’s meat supply – lost in six months of Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle. Those seven big corporations, Swift, Armor, [and others] lost 50% of their sales.

The market voted. I never heard of such a thing. You mean people think? Yes, if they get information, they think. See, it’s the lack of information that makes us stupid. If people get information, they make different choices, and that’s what they did. And so these seven big corporations went on bended knee to Teddy Rooseveltski and said, “Please save us.” He said, “Okay, let’s give a government stamp to your food.” The company said, “We need a government stamp to buy us credibility with the public.” And so in 1908, they got the Food Safety Inspection Service – FSIS. Before then, you and I could transact business without any bureaucrat being involved, neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce was ubiquitous in the country.

You didn’t have to ask the government’s permission to buy a glass of raw milk from your neighbor. But the FSIS changed all of that. Suddenly, there was a bureaucracy between our ability to engage in a food transaction. Two hundred years ago, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker were embedded in the village. They lived above their shops. They went to church in the community. Their kids played together. Everybody knew who the scofflaw was. That guy’s clean, that guy’s dirty. That guy’s a better cheesemaker. That guy’s not a good cheesemaker.

It vetted itself because of the transparency of embeddedness in the village. In industrialization, the village butcher, baker, and candlestick maker moved to massive facilities behind razor wire and guard towers, the industrial food system. And paranoid consumers who couldn’t get access, got scared of what they couldn’t see behind that fence. And who did they turn to for salvation? The government, Ralph Nader writes, “Please protect us. We need a bigger bully than corporate. We need somebody to look over that fence and take care of us.”

So what started out as sincerely motivated and desired…what they didn’t realize was that rather than looking over the fence, the bureaucrats were going to go to bed with the industry – created agency capture and the revolving regulatory industry door. Today, an industrial inspection system is outdated. We need the Uberization of the food system. 

Fifty years ago, if somebody had come to you and say, you’re going to get in a car that’s not marked with a chauffeur’s license, not driven by somebody who’s been vetted in Calcutta and say, “Take me to a museum,” and you’re going to trust that driver to take you there? You’d have said, “What? I’m waiting for a taxi.”

What made it possible? The internet creates democratized real-time vetting. Uberization allowed a completely government-unsupervised transaction to occur that had been a heavily policed government-intervened transaction beforehand because the internet re-embedded the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the global village voice through the democratization of information and real-time vetting. If you’re a bad passenger, you don’t get a ride. If you’re a bad driver, you don’t get a passenger. It becomes self-vetting. 

Think about Airbnb. In 10 years, Airbnb doubled the rooms of the Marriott, Sheraton, and Hilton restaurant chains globally, worldwide. [They] doubled the rooms of all three of those large hospitality chains without driving a nail, completely outside government control. That’s the power of unleashing into a marketplace. So I have a suggestion to this problem of food transactions. How about we try liberty instead of regulation so that consenting adults, exercising freedom of choice to give their microbiome agency- these are all powerful phrases- should not have to ask the government’s permission to engage in a food transaction.

We have freedom of choice in the bedroom, in the bathroom, and the womb, but not in the kitchen. I suggest the solution is a food emancipation proclamation so that we can engage in the direct exchange of food neighbor to neighbor without government permission. 

Now, there is opposition to this idea. The opposition starts with, “Well, we can’t give special concessions to you. I mean, we need a level playing field. We can’t let you get away with something that Tyson can’t get away with.” That’s like saying, “We’re going to allow football only in NFL stadiums. We need a level playing field.”That Sunday afternoon pickup game in the yard where the goalpost on one end is the lilac bush and the clothesline and the other end’s the five gallon bucket and a shovel stuck in the ground; that doesn’t get it anymore. We’re going to level the playing field. And in order to play football, the only place you can do it is in an NFL stadium with a certified referee. That’s a level playing field.

It’s not the same game, folks. It’s not the same game. It’s a totally different expectation. It’s a completely different game. 

Next opposition: Food safety. When I was testifying in Richmond several years ago for a cottage food law, our Commissioner of Virginia Agriculture and Consumer Services pulled me aside during a break. Very nice man. And he said, Joel, he said, we can’t let people choose their food. We couldn’t build hospitals fast enough to accommodate all the people getting dirty food from dirty farmers. And he was sincere. I’ve got to take him in good faith. I don’t think he was making it up, I think he really believed this.

Of course, when you say that, the assumption is that you trust bureaucrats more than farmers, which I think is questionable. And I would suggest furthermore that our hospitals – we already can’t build them fast enough for people getting sick from government-approved food. So don’t talk to me about sick people. See, the problem is the way this is buttoned down at the federal level. If our county wanted to try this (Maine has tried it. They’ve been the most aggressive and got shot down.), the federal government won’t even let a locality or a state try. 

Food choice. Yes, we have cottage food laws, but you’ll notice it’s not meat and dairy and it’s not poultry, which is 50% of the grocery bill. Twenty-five percent is dry goods, 25% is fresh produce, 50% is animal proteins in the American budget. So if we’re really going to address the food system, we have to address the animal sector, and that’s the one that the federal government has wrapped up at the federal level because you cannot buy a T-bone steak in this county that was raised and processed in this county. In order for you to buy a T-bone steak from my cow, that cow has to go up the interstate to a federal inspected processing facility, and we have to re-import to the farm.

Every T-bone steak you see in that freezer down there, had to take a trip off the farm live and come back frozen so that I could sell you a T-bone steak from a cow that’s 50 feet away and is happy to never leave the farm that way. We could keep her guts here. We could compost those. No, no, those have to go to rendering. In fact, the trailer that we take 15 steers up to the processing facility back, if we wanted to bring the guts back, the same trailer in 50-gallon barrels that took the live animals up three hours, three hours ago, and now they’re dead. We’re bringing the guts back. That’s now a hazardous material that needs a hazardous handler’s license and can’t be transported on the road.

Ultimately, these food safety laws have nothing to do with food safety. All other hazardous substances, prescription drugs, fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, name your thing, you can’t buy them. You can’t give them away. You can’t possess them, and you certainly can’t feed ’em to your kids. But food, the prohibition is only on the seller. You can buy it, you can use it, you can feed it to your kids, you can feed it to your neighbors, you can give it away. You just can’t sell it. So who’s kidding who here? If it was really dangerous for me to butcher a beef in the field and take out a T-bone steak and sell it to you, if it was really dangerous, it ought to be I can’t give it away. You can’t buy it and you certainly can’t feed it to your kids. So the hypocrisy of this is so glaring that it defies imagination.

If we had a food emancipation proclamation, here are the benefits quickly. 

Number one, production would never leave the farm for processing. This would create a 30 to 40% price savings of local food. People always accuse us in the local food business, oh, you’re a bunch of elitists. Look how expensive your price is. Well, it’s largely because we’re trying to squeeze an artisanal product through an industrial commodity paradigm and it doesn’t work. 

Harvard Business Review did a study on craft versus commodity. People make money in commodities. Absolutely. People make money in craft. Absolutely. The problem comes when craft tries to be a commodity and commodity tries to be craft. And right now we have a craft product being struck, pushed through an industrial paradigm and it doesn’t work. High-priced craft food competes with commodities. The production [needs] to stay on the farm with all the benefits. 

Number two, the production waste streams are integrated in other farm enterprises. We could compost the guts. If you’re making cheese, you can feed the whey to your pigs, the animal edibles, all these things. This creates a fundamentally circular integrated carbon and food system. The big problem – one of the big problems we have in our food system is – it’s fundamentally segregated. We have broken apart all these beautiful, synergistic, symbiotic relationships. That’s why chickens and pigs were always next to the homestead because they ate the kitchen scraps and the garden junk. And when we take all this off-farm, we don’t close that loop. 

Number three, there’s an economic on-ramp for new entrepreneurial farmers by being able to access the retail dollar. I meet thousands and thousands of homesteaders and small farmers around this country who could easily make a full-time living on a 10-acre place if they could sell retail.

Number four, affordable choice for buyers. Affordable choice for buyers. If we open this, the options for food, you can’t even imagine what kind of options there would be. Aunt Alice’s summer sausage, Uncle Jim’s charcuterie. There would be so many options. You can’t even imagine it. Aren’t we interested in choice?

Number five: Food deserts would be eliminated [if] every vacant lot in the city with an entrepreneur-savvy nearby tenant [who] could grow food in that vacant lot and sell it to their neighbors. Today, if somebody grew food in there and made a pot pie for the folks in the apartment complex, within five minutes of selling the first one to a voluntary consenting informed buyer, there’d be six bureaucrats knocking on your door. 

“This isn’t zoned for business. Where’s your fire extinguisher? Where’s your separate toilet? Where’s your HACCP plan? Where’s your cold chain?” All this stuff. And so the food deserts persist. 

Number six, we would dismantle the oligarchy. Bernie Sanders and AOC are running around the country. “Got to stop the oligarchy. Got to stop the oligarchy.”

Well, the only way they can envision to stop the oligarchy is a bigger government program or agency to police the oligarchy. That’s what we’ve been doing for a century. And look where it’s gotten us. Upton Sinclair thought it was a monopoly in 1906 when seven companies controlled 50 percent in the meat supply. Today, after the government’s intervention to protect us in the food system, four companies control 85%. 

And we think that’s a free market. The reason that we’re so consolidated and centralized is not because of a free market. It’s because for a century and more the government has put its hands on the scale in prejudicial, concessionary regulations that make big outfits cheaper to run than small ones. 

And number seven, and finally, this could all be done with zero government agencies, no expenses, no bureaucrats, and no elevated taxes. What’s there not to love?

So how do we create change the quickest and the easiest? I’m not an abolitionist. Is that the best way to change? Criminalizing what we don’t like? I suggest we get where we want quicker and easier by creating a functional underground railroad. A functional underground railroad. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a college in California to a bunch of students in a lecture hall. And during Q&A, something just prompted me to ask a question spontaneously. I said, I want to see a show of hands. How many of you think that in order to eat a carrot from your own garden, a government inspector should have to certify that it’s safe to eat? And a third of the hands went up.  It’s in California.

But I want you to just think about that for a moment right now. Folks, we have momentum. We have momentum. And the fastest way to health is good food. And the fastest way to good food is to unshackle farmers and buyers from food police slavery. So I don’t apologize. So what’s my dream? What’s my dream goal? I’ll tell you, my dream goal is: I want 30 minutes with Trump. I believe that if I made this pitch to Trump, he would be all over it. 

What could be more Trumpian than a Food Emancipation Proclamation? And I close with this. What good is it to have the freedom to pray and preach and assemble if we don’t have the freedom to choose the fuel for our bodies to go pray, preach, and assemble? The only reason our Founders didn’t guarantee us the right to food choice is because they couldn’t have imagined a day when you couldn’t buy a glass of raw milk from your neighbor.

You couldn’t buy a neighbor’s summer sausage and you couldn’t buy a neighbor’s tomato salad or tomato soup. They couldn’t have imagined it. But here’s where we are today. And I suggest that a food emancipation proclamation is a way to solve multiple issues and multiple problems, not with regulations. I mean, the most disempowering thing you can do to a citizenry is to say the only way to solve this is with regulations. 

That’s the most disempowering citizen thing to do. Citizenry. No. The way to solve these things is by letting grassroots, entrepreneurism bubble up and giving thousands and thousands of food producers access to the market, chipping away at the oligarchy and giving us a food choice -freedom for safer, more secure, more stable food supplies that is empowered by a whole bunch of speedboats and not a big aircraft carrier. 

How many of you’re with me? Yeah, let’s do it. 

So now, may all your carrots grow long and straight. May your radishes be large but not pithy. May tomato blossom end rot affect your Monsanto neighbor’s tomatoes. May the coyotes be struck blind at your pasture chickens. May all of your culinary experiments be delectably palatable. May the rain fall gently on your fields, and the wind be always at your back. Your children rise and call you blessed. And may we all make our nest a better place than we inherited. God bless you. 

Thank you.