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Joel Salatin From Amazon.com 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. Peak Oil Resources Review: If there was ever a book that was written that challenges the assumptions of industrial agriculture and the ineptness of federal regulations to secure "safe" food for the consumer, this is it. There are few books that convey stories in such a way that get me steaming over the marked injustice of events. Reading about food inspectors and the government preoccupation with paperwork instead of quantifiable and testable results was a maddening experience. Shouldn't the issue with food safety really be about safety? One would think so. Unfortunately it isn't. Paperwork and smothering amounts of red tape, that is the bottom line. Throughout this discourse on local food production, these stories rise to the top and illustrate how little common sense factors into the decision of what you and I are permitted to bring to our table. There is simply too much ground covered in this book for me to briefly touch on each topic. They are all important. Ultimately, the take home philosophical question is found in "who are we the master of?" Ourselves? Hardly. We are not permitted the simple freedom to choose what we will and will not consume. Rather, Salatin argues rather convincingly that we are effectively wards of the state. And the state tends to view us as not entirely more intelligent than a tree stump. Reading this book and taking an honest look at the state of affairs will certainly lead one to that conclusion. I can hardly do this book justice in a review. It is too good and too important. Salatin has a remarkable way of illustrating background, events, and motivations behind all of the topics that he addresses in a relaxed fashion that makes me think that he had to emotionally dissociate himself from these situations in order to write about them for the sake of his sanity. This book is in my opinion one of the most important books written in a long time. An entire course could be taught with it as the text. It should be a part of every high school and college curriculum that even tangentially touches on local and federal government, ecology, biology, sociology, etc. Few books attain this level of importance in my opinion. This one does.
Joel
Salatin
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Everything
I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front