War Stories from the Local Food Front
by Joel Salatin
352 pp
I was fortunate enough to meet Joel Salatin a few years ago, when a friend and I made a trip to Polyface Farm to stock up on their good meat. He was gracious enough to chat with us for over an hour, and during the conversation he mentioned that he had three more books in the works: one on the industrialization of agriculture, which was since published as Holy Cows and Hog Heaven; a philosophical memoir, which he expected to be his final published book; and a book on the current deplorable state of government regulation, which at the time he called Food Fights, but has just been published as Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. This last one was inspired by an essay by the same title he wrote for the magazine Acres USA, one which bemoaned some of the absurd encounters he had experienced with food regulators; it is by far his best-known published work, reaching people far beyond the usual circle of folks interested in Salatin's methods for growing food, and it forms the first chapter of the book.
The new book is an extensive collection of horror stories, recounting Salatin’s various run-ins with the state and federal authorities who want to restrict his ability to sell food. The involvement of food is incidental; although eating may be subject to heavier and more senseless regulation by the state than most other social activities, the conflicts Salatin describes do not arise from the nature of food but from the law of unintended consequences, and as such they are relevant to anyone who needs to interact with the modern bureaucratic nanny state.
The stories themselves are ridiculous, and are retold by Salatin in a lighthearted and often baffled way. And as a result there is, in fact, a danger of taking the stories too lightly, just more fodder for the “ain’t it awful” conversations with which we love to while away an evening. But if you keep in mind that all these horrible things really happened to the Salatins, to people who are trying to get healthy food to their customers, precisely because they are trying to get healthy food to their customers—well, the stories then quickly become oppressive, and it becomes hard to read more than a couple of chapters without setting down the book in impotent frustration.
A worse danger, though, than taking the book too lightly would be to allow it to stoke one’s righteous indignation. The consequences of the food laws, and the behavior of the bureaucrats who enforce them, is so foolish that one is tempted to think that if only the good-hearted and sensible American public became aware of what was really going on, we could all pull together to clean up this mess. To some extent, Salatin succumbs to this temptation by repeatedly comparing the current deplorable situation to the way it was, or the way it ought to be, and suggesting that if we could just return to a simpler, more sensible approach then stories like these would no longer be told. I think he is dead wrong about this, but in the end it doesn’t matter much because the book is not a clarion call to fix the system—Salatin is a generally apolitical, very practical man who is mostly concerned with being able to do what he thinks is right, and what he proposes to his reader is not that they get involved with fixing the system, but that they find ways to stay as uninvolved with the authorities as possible.
A weakness of this book, but only a minor one, is that it doesn’t really close the deal by proposing a path out of the mess. In fact, that may not be a weakness but a strength. One of the things that makes Neil Postman’s books so valuable is that he concentrates on telling what he knows, namely why modern society is the way that it is, and slights the part that he doesn’t know, namely how to fix it. We should read Postman’s books not in search of a solution, but in search of insights into a situation that will help us formulate our own responses to it. The value of Salatin’s book is exactly the same; it helps us to see exactly what damage the bureaucratic state is currently doing, but leaves it up to us to figure out how to structure our lives in light of that knowledge.
Summary: Everything I Want to Do is Illegal is a very good book, and important reading for anyone who doesn’t understand that the state is the enemy of the free man. But it doesn’t present a way out of the current mess. That, I think, will be found in a careful and thoughtful reading of Salatin’s Family Friendly Farming.
From the publisher's 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 nonorganic 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.
