btw, i wasn't very clear about _why_ I think Pollan's completely lost the plot (and not just why Joel Salatin is a creep to my mind). Pollan's argument is that buying your food from people you know, that local, slow food is what creates a healthy community totally falls apart in the face of this factoid: Joel Salatin looks 8 interns in the face every summer, and who knows how many others, and pays them a substandard wage that *he* clearly would not work for. He eats with them, sleeps under the same room, works with them side by side. All that glorius community didn't change Saletin's basic beliefs about who deserves a good wage and who doesn't. It didn't do one wit of anything to break down that guy's worldview, as Pollan seems to suggest it might. And that is because Joel Salatin is operating within a market system. For all Pollan's railing against the reduction of items of exchange -- well, not any old item, but food! (because it's special!) -- to mere price (values not value!), all of it still operates in a market economy where the material social relations of exchange, and all the attendant culture (whether thickly or thinly veneered over our nature) is telling Joel Salatin that it's perfectly OK to exploit people's labor.