Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front | Joel Salatin | Mandatory reading

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Everything I Want ...

	Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front Joel Salatin Polyface, 2007 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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Everything I want to do is illegal

Joel Salatin is a pionner. He is opening the way for all of us in tomorrow's world of good food coming from self sustaining farm. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in your future.

Mandatory reading

I found this book very enlightening and I think everyone should read this book at least once. I would compare his anecdotes to those of Upton Sinclair when he wrote the The Jungle. This is why you see so much criticism among these reviews, because the things he writes about are rather shocking to those of us outside the farming community. None of us liked to read about the things that went on in the meatpacking industry and I doubt most people would pick Sinclair's book a second time for that reason, it's impressions were that strong the first time around. Well the same can be said for this book and that's why some here have criticized him so voraciously. You won't step away from this book without seeing things differently, it's really that insightful.

Beyond the subject matter, the writing is engaging for the most part and I think most everyone will find it as such. I didn't like the page formatting, since he double spaces between paragraphs, but this is relatively minor. I might add that on a couple of occasions he presses too hard on a few points. It's as if he wants to convince people of his message before telling the whole story. His story is enough to convince people, so this preaching and double spacing does feel like he's trying to add bulk to the book.

His story really needs to be told, so I hope everyone reading this review will take the time to read this book. I can even envision that one day schoolchildren will be reading this and Sinclair side by side. They'll then wonder if people and government really were like that prior to their generation. If you stopped eating hotdogs after reading The Jungle, you'll probably start eating locally after this one, it's really that compelling.

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Great Book

Well written, humorous stories from an independent small farmer detailing his struggles with government oversight and inspection. The role of the USDA in particular and government regulators as presented by Salatin is to make things as difficult as possible for the independent farmer.

Most of the health problems in the US directly arise from the industrial food system. Local, independent food is the answer!

This Guy is a Nut!

Salatin is a nut, but a very interesting nut. Now, this book is titled "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal" and so I should expect complaining. But, this book was over the top. He justs rants. In his view, no one but him can figure anything out. He will argue for a position in one chapter but against it in another. For instance, he says chicken should be tested based upon the birds health levels, not how the bird is taken care of. But when government inspectors show up at his farm to test his birds for bird flu, he feels he is being persecuted. He makes some interesting points, but he also gets some basic facts wrong (e.g. he says the VFW database was recently hacked into, but it was the Department of Veterans Affairs - the former is a private organization, the later is public). Also, more than complaining about how what he wants to do is illegal, he just complains. It seems that everyone is dumber than he is. He complains that regulations hurt him, but ignore the fact that there are many businees out there that would do even less without the regulations. His theory that the market will work itself out assumes that everyone cares as much as him. Dispite all this though, the book is an entertaining read.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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