Meg Reads: Folks This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin

It’s springtime, so it was a perfect month to read a book to inspire homesteading!  I listened to this audiobook over the last month while weeding, planting, and watering our garden, and building the chicken coop. 

I loved a lot of what Joel had to say. 

I also disagreed with a lot of what Joel had to say.  

Joel romanticizing the “old way” of doing everything, and how “it’s worked for thousands of years. This new way of ___ just ain’t normal.”  Is the general idea of the book.  New methods to mass produce food on super farms obviously introduce a lot of new and harmful problems.  He goes back to simplify simplify simplify.  That speaks to me.  

But he also highly criticizes big farms for the sake of being big.  It’s not REALLY that the “new” methods are dangerous that bothers him. It’s that the government mandated “food police” solutions for the large farm problems are also forced on small farmers, (where the problems do not exist) and puts small farmers out of business.   He wants a live and let live ultra libertarian symbiotic world, that even I—-—an idealist cannot see.  Joel also roots for legalization of everything and he is anti vaccine. I’m not for huge government, but because I believe a “live and let live” is a permissive playground for addiction that so very often leads to destruction of families and hurt kids, and let communicable diseases run wild and free (also hurting society’s most vulnerable)   I can’t get completely on board with libertarian “legalize all the things and don’t make anyone do anything they don’t wanna do” ideals. 

 I also have a unique reader perspective as the spouse to the buyer of mass produced animal products for the worlds largest retailer.  And he’s a pretty good guy, who cares about the general health of the customer, as well as the safety and well being of his suppliers.  He visits the plants/arbitoires and our family eats the products he chooses. He’s definitely not being coached by an evil supreme leader sith Lord. I understand Joel’s case for small farmers. But again, his reason for still wanting small local farms is because “large farms are the death of innovation”.   But he criticizes every new innovation and then is frustrated he’s accused of being a Luddite.  

It sounds like I didn’t enjoy the book. False. I loved this book! But I read it as an opinion.  I learned so much and was inspired to return to backyard chickens and home composting (the composting is going terribly, btw! I think my carbon/nitrogen ratio must be way off. But hey, I’m a “woman of action and confidence” now (see next post) so I’m not afraid to just keep trying! Haha!  I loved Joel’s historical explanations for how and why things were done the way they were 100 years ago. I often consider myself a Luddite who is terrible with technology and would have thrived living 100 years ago. Well, all the outdoor plumbing thing...

Anyway, this book was well written. I had to look up a few words Joel kept using, like arbitoir (slaughterhouse/plant) CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operations—a large farm, essentially), and hubris (prideful speech). There were a few others not in my vocabulary, but it was a great read and Joel paints a beautiful picture of small farming lifestyle, homeschool, and just. Slowing. Down. Eating our own food. Sharing with neighbors. Loving and helping our neighbors and community living. Not wasting our lives away spending hours in the car driving ourselves to have life experiences. You know that part speaks to me! I can’t figure out a way to offer music and culture and variety to my children without getting in the car and spending hours carting each of us to our interests. But I suppose that’s really just a season and we have our entire lives to spend enjoying home.  

Home. I LOVE the way Joel describes his feelings about being in his own home. It is how I hope my own family feels about our home. My favorite quote from the book is in a chapter about the excessive miles our food travels, and that we travel for vacations and entertainment.  Tourism and travel is great, he says, but not a necessity for happiness, and not where our focus should be spent obsessing over, detailing, and perfecting.

“...Home be as exciting as any discretionary destination. We’ve divorced our own homes as the centerpiece of life And that disunion manifests itself in running elsewhere looking for satisfaction.” 

Preach! As I focus on creating the culture within my home, first. I am fulfilled, and I can more easily discern the beautiful parts of the outside world I want to see and share a part in influencing and shaping our lives.  Travel is not the goal, it is simply an additive to bring depth into an already rich home centered life. 

I now have a garden going again, 5 week old chickens, a wannabe compost pile, and a reminder to be a better steward to the earth. To waste less and recycle more. To lay up storage against the winter months. To love and serve my neighbors. 

So while there’s some flip flopping in Joel’s ideas about what “being different” means and whether it is good or bad to be normal, I still thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend this book, because it challenged me to look at my own ideas about normal and different are and question my ideas. I considered my mindset, and what experiences and education have formed my opinions, and whether I still stand with those opinions. I thought about what ways my family is different, and what ways we are considered normal, and to whom, and whether those opinions actually even matter.