Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Drawing upon 40 years’ experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin’s expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

Rating : - Lots of opinions, but where's the evidence?
More of a political piece than I would have hoped for, Joel Salatin did prepare me for his rant-laced manifesto when he titled his book Everything I Want to do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. I had wrongfully assumed that Salatin would offer stories and anecdotes regarding procuring and selling local foods. Instead, I was greeted with a long-winded, bitter outburst that provided few real solutions for what Salatin deems to be the e.coli to his beef: government bureaucrats.

The true "meat and potatoes" issue in this book is an issue that I do empathize with: his frustrations dealing with bureaucrats and seemingly ridiculous rules and regulations that most agree are designed for corporations and big agribusiness and are forced to make sense in the world of the local farmer. While wading through the insatiated and incensed rhetoric of Salatin's grievances against the government, readers can recognize the need for a separate, applicable set of rules and regulations for the local farmer, although those are not the desires of Salatin himself as a farmer who longs for the absence of all regulation.

I feel this book may only appeal to other readers who suspect and distrust the government as much as Salatin does. Perhaps my disappointment in this book lies more in what I expected from it and how it differs vastly from what I received. Salatin's attacks on government policy and government workers who he identifies as bureaucrats display a rampant mistrust of any authority figure, especially those who threaten the livelihood of his farm. Ironically, Salatin's utter hatred of the bureaucrat is reminiscent of the average consumer who is suspicious of food items that do not hold government-safety-inspected seals.

While his points about more rules and regulations being for big agribusiness and not taking the local farmer or food producer into consideration, the points could have been made in a more thoughtful, amicable way than was offered. However, when someone introduces themselves to you as "a third generation-Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist lunatic" what else would one expect but this reading, in its truest form? I do not empathize with Salatin's argument for the complete absence of regulation, but I do think that a separate, compassionate, and flexible set of rules need to be drafted and tailored directly to the constraints of the local farmer; rules that assure the quality of the food being offered to local consumers. That being said, I do sympathize with Salatin's position on the possibilities of our food vocabulary containing the words "irradiated," "genetically adulterated," and "reconstituted," however, our paths are divergent when reaching the end goal of delicious, fresh, local foods for as many as possible.

Salatin believes an overprotective, overinvolved government is the source of all his woes. However, his unsubstantiated assertions offer very little in terms of viable solutions. The book is more a rant against the national, state, and local governments than a real discussion about local food. Through the ranting, Salatin does manage to primordially stamp out an edict for a change in policy to allow local farmers to become self-sustaining entrepreneurs that meet the wants and needs of their local foodsystems.