Folks, This Ain T Normal By Joel Salatin: A Summary

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Joel Salatin emphasizes in his book Folks, This Ain 't Normal: A Farmer 's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World: “This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy.” It is conventional these days that we don’t know much about the journeys of the food we eat; even the small commodities such as sugar or salt have stories to tell us. By analyzing the food industry, through Sydney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, CBC Big Sugar Documentary on the Political History of the Sugar Industry (Part I&II) by Brian McKenna and Richard Wilk’s “Real Belizean Food”, it is momentous to accentuate that food consumption has facilitated transnational cultural flows, …show more content…

The wealth they created mostly returned to Britain, the products they made were consumed in Britain.

African slavery was considered “essential” to the sugar producing system. There created two major triangles of trade, which connected nations of the world Britain, Africa, West Indies and the New World. One important feature of these triangles is human cargoes. The documentary on Big Sugar by Brian McKenna supports Mintz’s ideas by revealing the dark side of working on the plantations, and the terrible working conditions that the labors (or slaves) back then had to suffer. They went hungry while working a 12-hour day to in order to earn just $2. Mary Prince, a West Indian slave said that:
I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies they forget God and all feelings of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie up people like hogs – moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were