Everything I Want to Do Is Racist

Chris Newman
8 min readSep 4, 2020

How America’s favorite farmer lost his way.

Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms (image from The Beef Site)

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Joel Salatin is. He’s the outspoken and vaunted founder of Polyface Farm — arguably the most famous farm in the world (as far as famous farms go) — a grazier, sustainable agriculture advocate, author of a number of books, the subject or feature of several food documentaries, and was made famous by Michael Pollan’s bestselling “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

Joel Salatin is also a world-class bigot. Let’s explain.

Whining and Entitlement

Some time ago, I published an essay about flaws in the systemic economics of small farming and its failure to pose a real challenge to conventional agriculture and traditional agribusiness. This is a subject I write about fairly extensively; while most of the farm-to-table movement focuses on blaming the consumer for problems in the food system and posing solutions accessible only to wealth and privilege, I and a growing (and decidedly diverse)…

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Chris Newman
Chris Newman

Written by Chris Newman

Building a new, accessible, open, and democratic food economy in the Chesapeake Bay region @ Sylvanaqua Farms

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