Alternatives to Allergenic Factory Food that's Making America Sick
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So basically, he's my kind of guy.
But he's biased. He feeds his kids clean food.
Reading Joel Salatin's enraging book, Folks, This Ain't Normal, I realized the globocrats are doing to small-time local food producers the same thing they're doing to small-time YouTube creators, Facebook conservatives, and free speech advocates of every stripe, Nazi or Commie.
Shutting them down.
The reader can only conclude, from a nature-loving, educated, credible Christian source, that the only clean food you'll ever eat is the food you grow yourself and share locally. Can't sell it, of course. Except as pet food. But you can give it away for free if you want.
The Jesus Economic System
This is what I call the money-free Jesus economic system. You produce $50,000 per year to $80,000 per year worth of food, and give it away. Others, especially clued-in Christians do likewise.
Wait, what? Why would you give away tens of thousands of dollars of food?
Not to bypass taxation, of course, but to bypass regulations designed to keep clean food off your children's table.
For instance, did you check with your team of 50 ex-regulator food industry attorneys before selling a cucumber at the farmer's market? Aha. They're shutting you down.
There are some work-arounds, if you care to know them.
Such as being a member of the NRA for local food growers. Being an institution, it can and will be infiltrated eventually and perform the opposite function it was established to do. Much like Disney films.
But if you're a chicken grower, you're going to get plain old tired of butchering and eating chicken all the time. Three kinds of meat is better than no kinds of meat and 17 months without food.
Trading opens up all kinds of different options.
At first blush it sounds slightly communist, of course, to produce what you can and give it to people who haven't paid. It sounds alien. But Jesus didn't say he was conventional. Quite the opposite. Conventional people get killed in communist countries like America.
When you can have a free food fair at the church, club, market, or organization, people can conveniently and freely exchange what they've got. It pays to think ahead to the days when there will be a black market for clean food in America, just like the speakeasies during prohibition.
It's not actually communist. (Real communism hasn't been tried yet! Kidding.)
Real communities (I have to recoil at the word) actually shared what they have, and actually get what they need. The benefits are large enough that you grow what you got, and bring something to the party.
If you never bring anything people want, you might not be invited back.
The idea can be much more decentralized than a co-op. It's not as formalized as trade exchanges. It's imply a BYOB party. Don't come empty-handed. Maybe bring a bottle of wine.
And, of course there's an app for that. Called MeetUp. As well as other trade groups. It might be a little harder to find a Nazi Christian-only potluck and computer GPU swap meetup. That's a little bit specific.
YouTube's Justin Rhodes also a 27,000-member strong Facebook group called Abundant Permaculture where you might find local connections. Not sure how many of them are goose-steppers, mind you.
You might want to see my article on Building a White Community for mindset and tips. I'd love your feedback and ideas on that, too.
Some people will say they're not happy unless they're being paid. They don't want to give away any free food.
But a farm is a business. Tell me. How much were you planning to spend on advertising to sell what you grow? Somewhere about 5% of your sales revenues, right? Even more if you're getting started, I suppose. And would you rather pay out of cash or spend your inventory to advertise your business?
Aaaaahhh. Yes. I'd rather spend some of my FREE inventory (see below) than pay ad expenses from my gross sales.
That's right. Jesus is Lord for a reason.
In addition, if you're just giving stuff away from your garden, how much are the taxes out of the zero dollars of sales? What's the value of the tax write-off on the food you give away?
No marketing costs, reduced taxes, making lots of friends who want to give you stuff to keep you coming back... I'm not seeing a down side, here.
Ordinary humans do this automatically. It's called friendship.
Just don't tell the IRS I helped weed someone else's garden for free, that I helped them maintain their cabin in the woods for free, and I once held open a door for free. They'll want their cut.
Bring some buckets of your delicious home-grown, grass-fed fried chicken. You paid for it in chicken feed and walked home with bottles of apple cider wine.
At the pot luck, everyone brought too much food, dessert, jello, and everything else, and whoever was hungry went home well fed with lots of leftovers.
If you had a mega pot luck, you'd expect to show up with truckload of grain and come home with a truckload of groceries for the freezer, new shoes, coats, boots, laptops, or whatever, never necessarily rising to the level of any formalized trade.
Some will want to formalize it, maybe for tax compliance purposes or to take a deduction, and you can exchange personal checks, especially with someone you trust.
There's going to be some losses along the way. But guess what? Everybody charges transaction fees. You're a guaranteed loser when you use the world's ways. And you're paying fees out of your cash sales made.
When you lose something to a thief or a bad trade deal, you're only losing inventory that would have rotted away in a freezer unused anyway.
When you spend all year making a nice, $2,000 tailored suit for someone, all hand-stitched using the finest imported materials, you'd like to be paid eventually.
But that's why lenders, accounting departments, collections, and can all justify charging a fee for the services they provide for you. There's no reason these services can't be paid for in stuff.
In fact, what the bank takes for non-payment is stuff. So why wouldn't you arrange to just give them the stuff as payment?
If I'm a small local grower, I'm in a much stronger position to make payments in inventory rather than cash.
Selling Without Selling
If I recognize that there are 20 other sources of money than traditional lenders, I might get a cash advance that's never repaid in cash, and that doesn't technically count as a sale.
What if I wanted to arrange to borrow $500 from Mike. I tell him there's a high chance I'll default on a loan. If so, he gets paid in $500 worth of chicken (or whatever I'm growing.)
Suppose I arrange to borrow the money for startup costs from Mike. I want to cover the cost of eggs, an incubator, feed, and cages.
He writes a check for $500. No sales were made. I haven't sold him food. It's a loan.
Step #2: Then I default on the loan. He accepts the $500 worth of forfeited locally-grown grass-fed chicken that cost me less than $100 to produce. And if it only costs me $100 of his seed capital to raise those birds, that means I've still got another $2,000 worth of birds I raised with his money.
And every "customer" like him gives me another $2,000 worth of birds I can raise. With 5 customers, that's $10,000 worth of birds. That's a whole lot of fried chicken.
And the cost of the loan? Free. I paid him using the inventory. Could have repaid him double, just to make him happy. Call it interest.
The cost of eating $10,000 worth of free fried chicken? It's all free. The seed capital came from someone else. My friends who lent me the money? They're happy.
I'm happy because I'm doing the same amount of work I'd be doing anyway to raise $100 worth of chickens, using little more than pocket lint as my seed capital.
Technically, I haven't sold Mike a damn thing, so it doesn't matter whether I'm marketing it as pet food or fishing lures to keep the inspectors off my back.
"That's not a chicken. That's a bag of dog food."
"What's in it?"
"Chicken."
Didn't sell it. Don't need to sell it. Could have pocketed some of the cash if I kept my expenses low and feed 10 families a year's supply of chicken. Maybe they'll be there for me when I need them.
How much time does it take each day to fling a scoop of chicken feed at the birds every day? Not that long.
Is it legal? Don't know. I just know these things happen all the time.
Joel Salatin's book says the food inspectors don't care about food safety. They just care about keeping their jobs. You can raise the birds in a bathtub, bring the food to church and make everybody as sick as a dog (Don't attend pot lucks at Capitol Hill), and the food inspectors won't make a peep.
But charge $1 for a drumstick, and they're down your throat in a heartbeat, trying to shut you down. Travelers have said there's more food freedom in China than the US.
Not that you'd want to try dog deep fried in motor oil over a brick of coal.
Tricking The Banker
There once was a man with excellent credit who took out a short-term loan for $10,000 on a Friday afternoon, collateralized by his beautiful, expensive sportscar. And just to show he was serious about repaying, he promised to leave the car parked at the bank and handed over his keys, promising to repay the loan quickly.
The banker was surprised, but extended him the loan. The man returned on Monday morning to repay the loan plus interest and collect his car keys and go.
As the man was leaving, the banker asked, "Wait. You obviously don't need the money. So why did you need to borrow $10,000 for the weekend?"
The man said, "I didn't. But where else can you park your car in New York for the weekend for four dollars?
Build Your Communities, Your Networks
They'll shut down your online activism, your political statements, your food, and your job. But if a servant of God will stick the right end of a potato into the ground enough times, he'll have food, clothes, and a place to stay.
While others starve, like they're starving in Venezuela, he'll have plenty to eat.
Some people don't believe that America's next. It's like the good Lord says. No one knows the hour or the day.
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