In addition to making cheese this past weekend, I spent time reading Joel Salatin’s new book, “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front”. Joel, of course, is the Virginia farmer who has become a celebrity of sorts for his commitment to ecological community-based farming, as well as ingenious marketing techniques, such as charging for tours of his farm.

He may have been the butt of a little ribbing on this blog, but this is a serious, and important book. I can’t possibly do it justice in a single posting, since Joel says so much that relates directly to problems and issues discussed on this blog over the last year or so. I suspect that it will become something of a reference guide for future discussions here, and elsewhere.

Just to summarize, the book chronicles Joel’s confrontations with bureaucrats of all types—agriculture, zoning, housing, and health, among others. It leads off with his fantasy as a teenager of building a business based on selling the raw milk from ten cows directly to consumers as a way to make a decent living as a farmer. Of course, his dream is quickly dashed when he discovers that raw milk is illegal in Virginia. The book then moves on to his encounter with agriculture inspectors who challenge his approach of selling customized beef, and in the process endanger a major chunk of his farm’s annual income. And indeed, it continues on, one confrontation after another. One, in particular, sounds very familiar:

“Unannounced, 6 p.m. on a Friday evening, the Avian Influenza Task Force veterinarians drove right into the midst of our dinner-on-the-grounds and demanded to see the chickens…They had judiciously not exited the car. They had not washed any tires or administered any sanitation protocol. After their perfunctory introduction, they courteously apologized, ‘Oh, we didn’t realize you had this going on’…To which I replied curtly, ‘That’s the problem with you people. You never know what’s going on.’…The veterinarians said they wanted to take blood samples to check for avian flu. I responded emphatically, ‘You are not welcome here. You may not exit the car. You are trespassing and I demand that you leave immediately.’ They backed out of the yard, turned around, and left. Again, they never stopped to sanitize their tires or do any sanitation protocol as they headed down the road to the next farm.”

Joel says he never heard from these guys again, and offers this advice to other farmers: “I encourage people being harassed by these bureaucrats to not be cowed into compliance. We’ve been told by these bureaucrats that if everyone treated them like we did, they couldn’t begin to do their jobs. Well then, let’s all treat them this way and maybe they’ll get so stressed out they will die of heart attacks.”

I know Greg Niewendorp spent some time with Joel the same time I was in Virginia last June, so maybe he read some advance proofs of the book and learned how to deal with the Michigan Department of Agriculture inspector who arrived with state police a couple weeks ago.

Joel’s outrage over the repeated indignities, and threats to his livelihood, relate also to the ongoing discussion about the supposed dangers of bovine TB from producers like Greg Niewendorp. Such situations, concludes Joel, are “not about food safety. It’s about denying market access to appropriate-scaled transparent products, and thereby insuring de-facto market protection for the current big players.”

Yes, this is an entertaining and insightful book, but it is also an angry book, and for good reason.