Behind America’s Growing ‘Food Freedom’ Movement
24th July 2026
Joel Salatin wants to liberate Americans from over-regulation with neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce.
Salatin, who runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is pitching the concept of a “Food Emancipation Proclamation.”
I have a number of Salatin’s books. He has many original ideas about agriculture, hates factory farms, and hates government regulatory micro-management. He’s the guy who convinced me to start boying pasture-raised eggs.
Through what he envisions as a federal declaration, consenting adults would be allowed to buy and sell homemade and farmstead food directly, without the costly commercial infrastructure and cumbersome government regulation currently in place.
Salatin’s mission reflects a push among homesteaders and independent farmers to cultivate local food networks, where food is grown and raised without chemicals and consumers can gain a more transparent connection to how food is produced.
The reason such a movement is needed is the effective erasure of the Institute for Justice calls the Dormant Commerce Clause in the Constitution, whereby anything that the government wants to pull within its clutches can be done by sophistry about what is and is not ‘interstate commerce’.
Got a pond on your farm? That’s a ‘wetland’ and the government can regulate it.
Grow crops for your own use? That affects Interstate Commerce because if you didn’t grow your own food all such food these days comes across state lines, so the government can tell you what to do and how to do it. Same reasoning applies to trading food with neighboring farmers or selling it locally.