Joel Salatin wants to give curious young apprentices hands-on training with his farm and animals. He wants to sell his neighbor’s pickles and salsa along with his own fresh meat and dairy products. He wants to give educational tours of his farm to classes of young students. Mostly, he wants to empower Americans to participate in traditional, natural food that will improve their health and cultivate strong local communities. The problem is, as the title succinctly bewails, what he wants is illegal...

Salatin is a farmer with forty years of experience in ecological farming and marketing. His Polyface Farm was featured in Michael Pollan’s recent runaway bestseller, Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Everything I Want to do is Illegal, Salatin shares anecdotes from many of the bureaucratic battles that he, as a small farmer, has had to fight. He also discloses keen observations into the past several decades and how they have shaped our collective perception of the food industry, then uses the same analytical thinking to project what must be done in the future to preserve the local food industry and the community life it supports.

The hemming and hawing of the cow police, the outrageous subjective inspections of the chicken police, and the whining of big-name mass producers will certainly entertain you, especially with Salatin’s no-nonsense narrative. But this book will also invite you to share Salatin’s righteous indignation toward overbearing and inefficient agricultural laws and excessive paper trails which all cater to the big and powerful. The purpose of this book is to show the American population what we are missing out on, and inspire us to demand change.