Book review: Folks, this ain’t normal!

More action, less words, less knowledge more experience! That’s Folks, this Ain’t Normal in a nutshell. 

While it’s one thing to discuss how we humans have become disconnected from the awe about our bodies and life, separated from the foods we eat, made more sedentary by our work and school and detached from our core biological needs, like sunlight, quality sleep and clean water and air, it’s another to live it for your very existence. Salatin’s farming reaches far beyond the fashionable catch-phrases of “sustainable” and “organic,” and beyond farmers to farmsteads to consumers. It’s easy to forget we live in a ecosystem that thrives on reciprocity, that instead our view of wellness is limited to taking care of our individual ‘bodies’. At Fbn we often talk that luckily that’s where health begins: within each of us. Here we can take a step even before that!

Saladin writes of the urgency for consumers to have a relationship with the production of their food at least by learning and experiencing directly as much as they can about how it is raised and made ready for table. “How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it?” It is no secret that most of us today have little visceral connection with the biological life around us—we don’t get our hands dirty with real dirt, are only familiar with animals as pets, and would be surprised to learn that a carrot is a root or that lettuce flowers and makes seed!

To interact with nature and food in this way is foundational to developing common sense. . . Staying grounded, very literally, and staying anchored in sensibleness requires a relationship with food production.

An eye opening and grounding read. Loved it!