I am currently reading "The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements" by Sandor Elliz Katz. It is an excellent read for me, a libertarian and someone obsessed with food politics. This clip from the introduction may serve as an example of the importance Katz places on direct action.

Here is a small glimpse of the revolution I see happening: It’s not a militant confrontation at all but rather a quiet culinary mutiny. It’s what’s known as “the bread club” in a Western town of about eight thousand people, which I cannot identify without jeopardizing the club’s continued existence. The club started in 2002 as the pickup site for bread baked by B., a fellow fermentation enthusiast I met in my travels, in the wood-fired brick oven he built himself.

From the start there was an underground aspect to the bread distribution. “I would gladly bake the way I do legally if I could,” says B. “The fact is it is impossible on my scale. For me to build a certified kitchen with attached oven, I would have to go greatly into debt and then bake my ass off just to pay off that debt, probably seven days a week, and then I’d grow to hate baking and hire other people to bake, and then I would just be a business owner. And so I bake underground, every other week, because I love to, and after two and a half years I still love it, and I actually make a little bit of money doing it. I just imagine all the underemployed people I know being able to do something like this, and be proud of it, and make a little money, and not be a minimum-wage slave, but it’s not legal. And that’s wrong.”

In the current regulatory environment, the rules make small-scale traditional food production and distribution almost impossible. Selling home-baked bread, or any food prepared in a home kitchen, is prohibited by most, if not all, health codes in the United States. Livestock for sale (with the exception of poultry, in most places) may not be slaughtered by the farmers who raise them; instead they must be trucked to anonymous factory-like commercial slaughterhouses. Milk and other dairy products may not be sold without pasteurization, which diminishes nutritional quality, digestibility, and flavor. Cider, too, is nearly always required to be pasteurized or irradiated. In other words, real food, increasingly illegal, is being replaced by processed food products. Laws dictating food standards are driven by the model of mass production, where sterility and uniformity are everything, rendering much of the trade in local food technically illegal. Eating well has become an act of civil disobedience. The bread club is political resistance.

It was the combination of reading this introduction and Brad Spangler's advice on ranchers violating the new NAIS that encouraged my poll on weighing the choice between activism to repeal laws vs. activism to violate laws. If you haven't yet, go vote. The direct subversive activism of the agorist serves as a contrast to the political lobbying of libertarians such as Ron Paul who are working to repeal NAIS. Both sides agree that the law is wrong. But there is disagreement on the best response: ignoring the law or working to repeal it. I wonder why no one is suggesting both?