I haven’t seen the movie, “Food, Inc.,” so I didn’t know what sustainable farmer Joel Salatin looked like until I saw him take the stage Monday night at the 92nd Street Y.  

I was immediately struck by his crisp gray suit and his red power tie. For all his subsequent talk about poop, Salatin’s corporate look announced that he means business. And that business is returning our culture to what he calls “historical normalcy.”

For Salatin, that means farming a variety of vegetables and fruits, instead of creating mini-monocultures of just-one-thing orchards or hundreds of acres of farmland devoted solely to corn. It means returning a variety of animals to the farm, too, and having them live in a way that allows them to express themselves fully. Pigs should be rooting around freely outdoors in heaps of composted food scraps, not confined in a barn with thousands of other pigs, eating antibiotic-and-hormone-laced feed while standing on a metal grate, so their poop can fall into a large collection system below. 

It also means everyone growing their own food. Even us city-dwellers.

“Get a chicken!  They’re better than a dog!” he told the packed auditorium at the 92nd Street Y.

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