Winter reading pleasure

I don’t often recommend books to a mass audience, but there are a couple that I have read recently that I think contain incredibly important messages.

First is a book written by an author dubbed ‘the high priest of the pasture’ – Joel Salatin. Hailing from America, his book “Folks, this just ain’t normal” analyses the current agri-industrial food industry with its reliance on chemicals and synthetic fertilisers against a more traditional, pasture based system where the land grows what it can support. It is a really good look at how our food is produced – and could be produced.

The second is called “Meat – a benign extravagance”, by Simon Fairlie. It is a book fairly heavy on academic/scientific research, and again is an excellent read. It looks at how we currently farm, and whether or not we should even eat meat. The author was once vegan, and chose to eat meat again because of the research he did. It provides a balanced treatise on the pros and cons of farming, and how the ever growing population can be fed. It provides damning evidence against factory farms, and suggests we should moderate our meat consumption accordingly.

The third is a book called “Farmageddon – the true cost of cheap meat”, by Phillip Lymbery. Lymbery has long been a member of conservation groups, and makes no attempt to hide his bias – but the facts as presented are pretty irrefutable. Factory farms and mega farms are destroying the agricultural world and doing irreversible damage to eco systems and waterways across the planet. He again does not advocate a meat free diet – far from it – but opens the readers eyes to the danger posed by the construction of mega farms and accompanying use of synthetic fertilisers and chemicals.

None of these three books are likely to be in your local library, but they are more than worth the investment. If nothing else, they will change the way you look at where your food comes from. In a world where more that 70% of the world’s population is expected to be urbanised by 2025, there is a growing lack of understanding about where food actually comes from. This allows the industrial farms to become even more cavalier with our health. They no longer care about the land – it is all about money.

As I started to read Farmageddon, I listened to a story on the ABC about a mining magnate who is about to build a mega-dairy on the Victorian/South Australian border, and listened to the non-farmer mining magnate tell the audience that each of his cows had to milk a minimum of 10,000 litres each year. Any that didn’t would be replaced. When the announcer asked about his environmental approach, his response was simply that profit trumped all. It is all about the money.