I read this 2007 release back in 2019 so today's summary comes with the usual caveats regarding the cobwebs decorating the edges of my notes. One thing that struck me as I reviewed online commentary about this work was the sheer number of people who felt Salatin's political views made for a lesser book. Most of these comments are a decade-plus old so I imagine this aspect has not improved over the past few years. That said, I think it's a highly recommended work for anyone who can keep their focus on the details specific to Salatin's experience in trying to bring local food to the table.
A big theme - perhaps the only one - of this work dealt with the effect of regulation on the small producer. Everything Salatin wants to do, in a sense, seems to encounter one bureaucratic obstacle or another. The portions of my notes that jumped out to me in this regard spoke first to general principles which Salatin then ties back to his experience. For example, noting that innovation requires many tiny prototypes with the space and flexibility to iterate, Salatin points at regulations dictating minimum starting sizes as an enemy of innovation (and somewhat questionably blames this for inadvertently creating a closed market). He also observes that industries where regulations burden producers will always disproportionately harm the smallest firms, adding that factors regulated for creating risk at scale might not cause problems in smaller settings and are therefore inappropriate to enforce for the smaller firms. The overall idea here is that bureaucracy stifles our access to local food, which Salatin feels represents the highest quality food for the consumer.
If I had to offer something resembling either an alternate perspective or an outright counter-argument, I would consider where quality should fall within our collective food goals. A casual Google search suggests somewhere close to 700 million globally suffer from hunger, which is a figure I could easily see doubling or tripling based on the measurement methodology. I think Salatin's perspective, which prioritizes quality within a framework heavily influenced by his libertarian views, partly ignores the misalignment of his goal with that of the bureaucracy he blames for the issues he identifies in this book. If I had to choose a single priority for a collective food strategy, I would choose feeding everyone ahead of a consideration such as quality. In fact, I would choose feeding everyone at the expense of other seemingly more popular priorities such as minimizing the climate impact or remaining loyal to political philosophies. I'm always impressed with people like Salatin who apply their expertise in a specific area to sketch a vision of a world much-improved on our current mess, but I usually conclude that they are ahead of our time by decades or even centuries, when they may finally have the freedom to make the world a better place because we all agree that the world is, finally, good enough for everyone.
