Reflection Part Two on The Omnivore's Dilemma

Good morning! Here is my reflection on the second section that I read of The Omnivore's Dilemma. In this part of the book Pollan goes to visit and work on Polyface Farms, an alternative farm located in Virginia. Here is a picture of Joel Salatin, the man who runs it.

Here is what I wrote up for class:

After spending almost 200 pages reading about the horrors of the industrial food system and the better-but-still-not-great industrial organic food system, it was a relief to start reading about Polyface Farms. I remember how moved I was by Joel Salatin’s farm the first time I read the book, and how cool I thought it would be to intern there. I never ended up doing it, for multiple reasons, but mostly because as much as I love food I am not cut out to be a farmer. At any rate, Pollan’s description of Salatin makes him out to be quite a character. I had completely forgotten about his use of the word holon, but I love it. In the book it’s described as “an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part” (215). It’s such a perfect word to describe the different parts of a farm.
Although I believe that what Polyface Farms is doing is on the whole a good thing, I have also come to believe that Joel Salatin may not be the alternative farming prophet that Pollan makes him out to be. What changed my mind? Reading Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book contains an essay entitled “I Am the Last Poultry Farmer” by Frank Reese, a heritage turkey farmer. Reese says that he is the only poultry farmer left in America who is raising birds that haven’t been bred to live in factory farms. He says of Polyface Farms, “Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds… So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference… Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days… It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up” (Foer, 113). Reese definitely sounds frustrated in his essay, and it seems to me it has to do with the fact that Joel Salatin has gotten so much recognition after being featured so prominently in Pollan’s book.
I was curious to see what Pollan had to say specifically about Salatin’s chickens. He doesn’t say anything about them being industrial birds, however when he is describing how often the portable chicken pens that Salatin developed are moved he says they “had been calibrated to cover every square foot of this meadow in the course of the fifty-six days it takes a broiler to reach slaughter weight” (209). So the number of days is different between the two books, but even so, this means that Salatin’s chickens are living less than two months. Something seems off about that to me, although to be fair I don’t know how to raise chickens.
Regardless of what type of chickens Salatin is raising, I appreciate that he is able to slaughter them on site. I know that Temple Grandin has done a lot of work around improving the conditions of slaughterhouses for both the animals being killed and the humans doing the killing, but many of them are still run under very deplorable conditions. In describing what it was like to help slaughter the chickens Pollan says, “In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling” (233).  This sentiment can be applied to meat-eating in general in America. While I don’t believe eating meat is morally wrong, I do think we would be better off if everyone ate meat consciously and appreciated that a living creature gave its life, as opposed to just eating a burger without thinking about where it came from.