Tales of a Food Fighter
By Stefanie T. Stauffer
When I first started growing my own food at the Frog Island Community Garden back in the spring of 2009, I would’ve never predicted that 18 months later my little urban farming experiment would spawn a local hot sauce and salsa business. Ypsi-Grown, Ypsi-Made, y’all! But it took much more than growing a whole lot of hot peppers and hanging out at the farmer’s market to make my personal local food dream a reality. Sometimes it actually felt like more of a nightmare trying to navigate the mysterious and confusing world of food safety and food distribution. So, to shed a little light on how difficult it is for local growers and producers to get their food out there in a viable and sustainable way (and to hopefully make it easier), I decided to dedicate my first installments of ‘Adventures in Local Food’ to Cottage Food and Food Safety legislation.
The Cottage Food Bill has been on people’s minds since July when Governor Granholm signed it into law at the Growing Hope Center here in Ypsi. Since then, the passage of this legislation has been widely celebrated as a triumph for local food production. And it’s definitely a step in the right direction as it allows people to make jam, bread, fruit pies, and other items in their home kitchens for sale at the farmer’s market and elsewhere. But, my experience and the experiences of other local farmers show me that the law clearly doesn’t go far enough. It’s still pretty rough out there for small-scale growers who want to turn their end-of-season surplus into products that bring extra income. For instance, to sell hot sauce, a food that is practically the definition of food safety due to it’s high acid content, I had to get the products lab-tested at $50 per recipe to ensure safety before I would even be considered to receive a license. Aside from the fact that I have to use a commercial kitchen to produce it. And did I mention that that’s only to sell at the farmer’s market!? So, all this brings me to ask: who does this legislation really help? Farmers? Bakers? Jam-Makers? It seems to me that if we want local food to be a sustainable reality (aka viable all year) we want to make it as easy for local farmers to process and sell their surplus as it is for someone’s grandmother to make and sell a cherry pie…
But before we can talk about the long-term viability of local food production, we need to push past the fundamental fear of food that makes it so difficult for local producers to be successful in the first place. A fear of microscopic pathogens as invisible as they are deadly. A fear fueled by the constant outbreaks of E. Coli, Salmonella and other food-borne illnesses that are an unfortunate reality of industrial agriculture. So the only way to be safe is to irradiate our meat supply and eat triple-washed pre-bagged lettuce, right? Oh wait. Wouldn’t it be more effective to buy from local producers that us consumers can hold accountable with our dollars if something goes wrong? I’ll get more into that next time, but for now, I’ll play your food safety game Michigan Department of Agriculture but it’s time to change the rules so small grower-producers like me can play to win…
If you’d like more info on the Cottage Food Bill check out: http://michigan.gov/mda/0,1607,7-125-50772_45851-240577–,00.html
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