Foreword

rowing up in a middle-class, white, southern, Protestant home in the 1960s, I literally did not know about the abuses incurred daily by African Americans in our community. If any family was not prejudiced, it was ours. After all, my mom and dad had spent a decade in Venezuela buying land and starting a farm, only to have it expropriated in a coup when I was four years old. Fleeing the back door as guerillas entered the front, we spent a few desperate weeks in Caracas trying to get protection for our property. The highest-level government ministers offered nothing but excuses. Unable to stay there, our family returned to the United States and found the cheapest, most worn-out piece of land in a three-state area. We started over in Virginias Shenandoah Valley, breadbasket of the Confederacy. Although our family was politically savvy, I dont remember any discussions about racial discrimination. The fifteen-minute drive from town (Staunton) to our farm took us by the countys black high school. After desegregation, which occurred in my preteen years, our integrated schools exposed me to numerous black kids and I became good friends with many of them. At least once, our family visited the largest African American church in the area during a special participatory performance of Negro spirituals. We were the only white family there. I still remember how slow they sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. In our white circles, we always sang it upbeat, but the African Americans sang it in a drawn-out, contemplative, yearning attitude. It was extremely moving, and with more mature retrospect, I can only imagine why slaves would not sing it in a joyous, upbeat demeanor. In my white circles, as a teen, I dont remember discussing racial prejudice or being exposed to anything about abuses against African Americans. For several years our little independent church group met Sundays in a
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black Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which, to my childs eyes, offered numerous fleeting interactions with the owners. They were always clean, courteous, and professional. At todays mid-fifties juncture of my life and awareness, Im discomfited by my ignorance about what was happening in our culture at the time. It rattles my spirit. It scares me. What am I allowing myself to be apathetic and ignorant about today? Will my grandchildren think me myopic, cowardly, or even complicit in some terrible injustice of our day? I can imagine them trying to figure out why Grandpa never apprised them of this wrong, this abuse. Allowed to persist, perhaps, and enslaving them in the natural extensions of unchecked abuse, would these injustices make them resentful toward my inaction, my disinterest? In todays world, injustice exists on many fronts. We could argue whether its worse than ever, but certainly our exposure via electronic communication saturates our lives with its sordid details in unprecedented volume. The problem with injustice is that it generally starts benevolently. Prohibition started as a backlash against alcoholism. The War on Terror started as vengeance for 9/11. Affirmative action started as remuneration for racial discrimination and slavery. The Food Safety and Inspection Service started as a solution to the abuses in mega processing plants exposed by Upton Sinclairs The Jungle. Oh, you were with me just fine until that last one, Ill bet. Up until 1908, food enjoyed unregulated commerce. The fact that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution ever mentions the word food indicates that it was such a ubiquitous and common part of human experience that the framers of our country couldnt imagine its restriction. Like air for breathing or sunshine for growing plants. But today, the U.S. government denies perhaps the most fundamental right: freedom of food choice. After all, what good is it to possess the right to own guns, assemble, speak, or worship if we cant choose good fuel for our bodies to propel us to shoot, pray, or preach? Is not food even more basic than religion? What religion can you practice without food? In America, this great land of plenty, why would I even mention access to food? Isnt every supermarket full of food? Whats the problem? After all, we have all sorts of choice. We can get milk from any number of suppliers, right? Wrong. What if its raw milk?
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Look at the meat case. Its full of choices. But what if you want chicken untouched by chlorine? Thats a different story. What if Id rather buy chicken from my neighbor, who dresses a few hundred in her backyard every year? In the name of food safety and fueled by a veritable paranoia toward food, the U.S. government has declared war on people who would dare to exercise their most fundamental human right to choose their food. Ultimately, this ideological clash is over who owns me as an individual. Who owns me? God? My neighbor? Society? If I am simply a societal asset, like copper fittings on an assembly line, then certainly society has a justified vested interest in keeping me from engaging in risky behavior that may land me in the hospital or an insane asylum. It has an interest in keeping me out of churches that may make me an unproductive societal asset. But what if society does not own me? What if I am free to practice my own beliefs and actions, even if someone considers them risky? Generally, personal rights extend as far as my neighbors nose. I can be noisy unless the noise infringes on my neighbors property. I can move my cow around wherever I want to, but not on my neighbors property. I can make a compost pile on my property, but it cant spill over on my neighbors. And I can cut a tree on my property, but I cant cut my neighbors. How much personal liberty can society tolerate? The founders of America decided it should be quite a lot, actually. Perhaps more than in any other civilization in history. But in the name of protection and security, our leaders are taking away these rights to free exercise, essentially criminalizing whatever fringe activity dares question governmental orthodoxy. This assault on food is simply another permutation of Prohibition and the war on drugs. To demonize and criminalize something as fundamental to self-actualization and personal liberty as drinking and eating, to subject this most basic human function to the strong arm of the government, is an abusive overreach that our founders would find intolerable. The most tragic part of this injustice is that most people dont have a clue its happeningand most dont even care. An entire alternative scientific and personal belief system exists in our day. It disagrees vehemently with such audacious agencies as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
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What does a culture do with its fringe folks? Does it arrest them and stand them before the inquisitors, pulling them apart on the regulators rack? The Romans had an axiom that you could tell a lot about the strength of a society by the number of laws it has. The stronger a society, the more it can abide differing opinions and lifestyles. The more fragile and weak a society, the more laws it needs to keep freethinkers from questioning orthodoxy. David Gumpert is a quintessential journalist. Impeccable to a fault, he plucks out some of the most salient battles in this current food war and brings them to our awareness with the storytelling genius of a spy novel. The intrigue, the angst, the heartache, and the heroism are all displayed to bring the personal element to something perversely impersonal . . . at least to those he calls our nations food police. My growing awareness of how our culture treated Native Americans and African Americans causes deep remorse. That is good, healing, cleansing. I would like to think that had I been living in those critical days of the most egregious injustice, I would have tried to stop it. Indeed, would I have gone along with Pizarro and the conquistadors as they slaughtered the Incas in Peru? You see, the very freedom to feed my child foods that I think will nourish her brain development and keep her away from hospitals is at stake. The very freedom to acquire for my own body the health-giving foods I believe it demands no longer exists. To equate this to these terribly unjust cultural clashes between native and immigrant or slave and free is a fair assessment of the current food struggle. If we as a culture do not become concerned, aware, and participatory in this great clash over life, liberty, and the pursuit of food rights, will our childrens children forgive us for standing by while the governmentcorporate-industrial food complex destroyed their freedom to choose raw over pasteurized, homemade over processed, living over dead? As you read this book, realize that for every story Gumpert publicizes, countless threatening letters, sick children, and food farmers with destroyed integrity remain anonymous. May this book awaken in each of us a righteous anger toward government injustice and a burning desire to encourage with words and patronage these heroes who dare to defy the powers of our day. These are my heroes. Its one thing to fight when the culture is backing you. Its quite another
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to fight your culture when its wrong. You will join the ranks of those who know about this desperate struggle. Its more important than gun rights, tax rights, retirement rights, or education rights. Thank you, David Gumpert, for giving all of us the information we need to bolster our resolve in this historic struggle. May we devote ourselves afresh to being food freedom allies. Joel Salatin

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