You're a Hero

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posted on

February 3, 2024

As a society, too often we miss true heroism. This is not to disparage in the least the folks who deservedly receive widespread accolades for heroism. Firefighters who risk their lives to save someone in a burning building. On the battlefield, the one who loses his own life to save others. The policeman who steps between a domestic altercation. Yes, we all understand these widely accepted heroes.

But another kind of heroism is standing in the face of orthodoxy during mundane decisions and activities of life to protect your children, your community, and the earth. Way too few people today think about these things.

We’re besieged with advertisements to eat and drink junk. Everybody’s eating Lunchables, right? And fast food—it’s ubiquitous. DoorDash is a click away, even for eggs and milk now. Defunding McDonald’s, Monsanto, and Tyson (“feeding you like family”) takes real effort. If you go with the flow, you’ll finance the production, philosophy, and poor nutrition of the chemical industrial exploitation complex. The only thing you have to do to make sure these miscreants thrive is to not think and not act.

When you sit down to a meal, pause a moment to squint your eyes and try to look through what’s on the plate to everything behind it. What kind of farms produced it? What kind of processing put it in packages for you to buy? What kind of framework delivered it to your hand? Then ask yourself: “Is this the kind of world I want my kids to inherit?”

With mRNA now being used (unlabeled) throughout the livestock industry and a dead zone the size of Rhode Island in the Gulf of Mexico holding steady, one of the most heroic things a person can do is patronize a healing food and farm alternative. Here at Poyface, we aren’t perfect, but we have a 60-year track record that builds soil, creates happy, contented animals, and brings superior nutrition to your plate.

We don’t rely on Russia for fertilizer. We don’t depend on Istanbul for grain. We don’t finance Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosate) or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) for feed. We don’t pollute the surface or groundwater for taxpayers to clean up. You won’t get diarrhea from anti-biotic-hyped super-bugs. Our animals don’t do drugs.

And the grass. Aaaah, the grass. Phytochemical taste and nutrition come from the pasture salad bar, our signature goal at Polyface. That’s why our eggs have 1,058 micrograms of folic acid rather than the 48 in supermarket eggs. Everything is superior when it gets fresh air, exercise, sunshine, and fresh salads. Because we depend more on grass (solar panels) and management, we’re less dependent on all the nefarious agendas bandied about by the industrial chemical food complex.

But you won’t find this at the normal supermarket. You won’t get it delivered from Grub Hub or DoorDash. You won’t find it at McDonald’s, Burger King or Chik-fil-A. You have to come to a conviction in yourself and make a conscious, intentional decision to find us, to patronize a more stable, secure, and safe system. Standing up to cultural normality takes courage.

In some ways, rushing into a burning building is easier. That crisis moment awakens in the human spirit a have-to, can-do, must-do hyper-awareness that often empowers us to rise to the calamity. But what about when the tragedy wanes? What about when it’s not as apparent? Making life-saving decisions when they seem unnecessary is harder. Crises always draw us to find courage and decisiveness that may not have been apparent.

But to exercise that courage and conviction when things are routine is difficult. Why participate in inconvenience when I can just be convenient? And normal? Because being content to be convenient is a fool’s game. Eventually, convenience catches up. America, as a nation, now leads the world in non-infectious chronic illness: heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. With the summer Olympics coming up, we’re all pulling for our little superstar Simone Biles and other U.S. contenders, hoping to be number one in numerous competitions. Being number one in chronic morbidity is not a number one spot to covet, folks.

The U.S. invented hydrogenated vegetable oil, TV dinners, DDT, GMOs, factory farming, mRNA, drive-through windows, and now leads the world in research toward lab-cultured fake meat. Standing into this takes courage, intention, conviction. So today, we salute, we honor, we appreciate you as everyday heroes who aren’t waiting until a crisis to act.

When you choose Polyface, you proactively take on the hero’s spirit to fight for your kids, your community, and our collective ecological nest. For immune function, nutrient density, and balance. For pollinators, bluebirds, earthworms, and functional microbiomes. That might not be a burning building, but it might be if we don’t invest in a better future. Thank you for leading the way, and for being a hero right now.

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel