Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal

The subtitle, War Stories from the Local Food Front, sets the tone. This book comes from a veteran ecological farmer who also worked in marketing, and it reads like field reports from a farm that keeps running into paperwork. Its central claim is that food rules and the officials who enforce them steer buyers toward large industrial and global supply chains. That leaves local producers with fewer places to sell and a shelf that looks more uniform and less interesting.

Anyone who has stood at a farmers’ market wondering why nearby produce costs more than the stuff trucked across the country will recognize the question here. The humor keeps a dense subject moving, and the stories are concrete enough that regulations feel like something that happens to people in a barn or a packing shed.

Every page comes from the farm side of the counter, so the reasoning behind those rules gets much less space than the frustration they cause. Pair it with something written by a regulator or a food safety researcher before deciding the system is rigged.