1906-2026 THE BOOK IS HERE
The federal government captured America's food system two years after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906. The book revealed corruption and filth in the meatpacking industry, concentrated in Chicago. Consumers fled the "big seven" meatpackers, who controlled 50 percent of the market at that time.
Desperate to regain favor with a distrustful populace, those companies pled Socialist President Teddy Roosevel for relief, and he obliged with the federal Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) in 1908. In the intervening century-plus, that agency has penetrated every aspect of America's food system, especially the animal sector. The result? Not safer food. Not stable food. Not secure food. Not affordable food. Not nutritious food. Rather, it has gutted (pun fully intended) a vibrant local food marketplace option and concentrated the meat sector to the point that only four companies control 85 percent of America's meat processing.
I dream to think that my new book, FOOD EMANCIPATION: UNSHACKLING AMERICA'S SUSTENANCE, could be the antidote to The Jungle. If Rooseveltsky had not buckled to the industry's demands, I could sell a homemade chicken pot pie to a neighbor. Or homemade charcuterie. Or a backyard-processed pig into sausage. A home-grown steer would not have to be exported from my county to a federally-regulated establishment, with loss of offal compost fertility and added diesel fuel, only to be re-imported in packages in order to legally sell a ribeye to a neighbor.
Could it be that our nation's inflection point post-covid, with distrust of Big Ag, Big Food, Big Pharma, and finally Big Government at a high point is ready to solve Upton Sinclair's original uncovered sins not with bureaucratic/industry bed-togethering, but real American liberty and freedom? On this 250th anniversary of 1776, it's time to liberate our food, our farmers, and our choice from the shackles creating dysfunction.
We expect the book to be available the week of Sept. 21. We're taking pre-release orders now at the Polyface gift shop. It'll be released to Amazon et. al. after Jan. 1. Here's the link:
In this book, I tackle the problem, explain the benefits from allowing direct freedom of food choice between consenting adults, and debunk the various arguments against unregulated transactions. Our culture right now is so far removed from the pre-1906 unregulated world it required 390 pages to articulate the reasons for liberty. Our country has tried to stop the sins Sinclair revealed with only one solution: government oversight. In the words of Dr. Phil, "how's that workin' for ya?"
This not a partisan issue. It is not just a farmer issue. From urban food deserts to rural homesteaders, I tackle the full spectrum of dysfunction and propose a wildly different solution: relational individual responsibility. You can call it freedom.
In my wildest imagination, I'd like to think that in a hundred years, our society will look back at FOOD EMANCIPATION in 2026 and see it as the unraveling of the oligarchy: the Big Four and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO. It could be the beginning of authentic nutrition, and an on-ramp for a budding generation of entrepreneurial young farmers who care more about land than profits, more about health than production, more about community than globalism.
I'm weary of the same old, same old. President Trump's Sept. 4 Executive Order claiming to make him the "most pro-rancher administration in history" is more fluff and bluff. I'll break that apart in a future blog. It's time to offer a freedom path out of dystopian government food entanglement. Thank you for caring. And thank you for reading a real book on real paper written by a real farmer and offered initially from an anti-Amazon platform. Ha!
How many of these books do you think it would take to enable a farmer to home-process and sell a pound of ground beef to a neighbor?
