How Etsy became America’s unlikeliest breadbasket
wsj.com
wsj.com
I had a friend try to do a startup to connect those who want to cook with those who wanted to buy but couldn't get much traction due to local city and county laws. After about a year he gave up on it.
I wasn't aware of this, I thought you needed to have a licensed kitchen. Neat!
My cousin is a restaurant inspector and the horror stories she has told even for professional kitchens is unbelievable. The apathy and greed of some is going to kill people some day.
Rice is one of the worst foods. Your choice is to keep it super hot or in a flat tray and chilled. There's a natural bacteria that grows if the rice is in a bowel and isn't hot anymore. I looked it up: bacillus cereus.
Soap is another it's incredible how many kitchens have no soap. The inspector arrives and then there is a scramble to find some soap. But it makes you think how many people had a crap and just went back to work without washing their hands with soap.
> Rice is one of the worst foods. Your choice is to keep it super hot or in a flat tray and chilled.
These laws generally apply to shelf-stable foods. So not rice.
> Soap is another it's incredible how many kitchens have no soap. The inspector arrives and then there is a scramble to find some soap. But it makes you think how many people had a crap and just went back to work without washing their hands with soap.
Isn't that the exact kind of problem that would be less likely in a home environment?
This sounds exactly like the sort of thing where statistics are how you get an answer. And, googling a bit, there's answers. Or at least details.
At some point, all food was like this, and AFAIK that day was at least as recent as the 1800s. Right? I wonder when the first time a "food inspector" (in the modern sense) was a thing.
That said, the knowledge of pathogens is relatively recent ~1670s which ended up changing many rules. Historically food safety was a major issue that killed a lot of people. But, it’s not really something most people know much about.
At some point all food was uninspected. But this isn't about all food. Those numbers are useless. This is generally about shelf-stable goods sold in small amounts. The sales are limited in two different major ways.
bowel?
Though reading wiki for B. cereus it doesn't seem like an issue for "fresh" rice but rather when rice is cooked, improperly refrigerated (aka not refrigerated immediately), then just warmed over: this allows spores to germinate, grow and produce toxins which are difficult to destroy (wiki quotes 56C for 5mn to destroy enterotoxins but 121C for 90mn for emetic toxins).
Thanks.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/03/29/west-vir...
Maine, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming have gone further, enacting “food freedom” laws that exempt home producers from food-safety rules that apply to grocery stores, restaurants and other food establishments.
The Wyoming legislature adopted the nation’s first Food Freedom Act in 2015, after rejecting it five times in seven years.
North Dakota passed a similar food-freedom law
The nearly limitless cottage-food laws in North Dakota and Wyoming are far from what’s happening in Washington. The D.C. City Council passed a cottage-food act in 2013, but final rules were not issued until December 2017.
New Mexico and West Virginia are considering food-freedom laws, while North Dakota legislators might clarify their intent in a 2017 law. A food-freedom bill in Mississippi died in committee in February
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
Your article also talks about Kentucky.
I am not getting an unstated part of my question answered: What are the laws in the Washington state (where I live)?
I don't personally have plans to start a food business from home, but I run r/GigWorks and several websites and I actively try to foster micro-enterprise to whatever degree I can as just one person with a lot of personal burdens myself.
Most cottage food laws not only prohibit wholesale distribution through a retailer, but also direct online sales. For example in Michigan, you can't take orders over the internet, even on your own website. Selling on Etsy is unheard off, I'm still not aware of any other state than West Virginia allowing that.
Maybe cottage industry is a term I need to use more. With the internet and all that, I think it ought to be easier to just make money from home, not harder.
We need to actively try to reverse some of these trends towards centralization and big business stamping out small business. These are some of the sources of our ills in the world today and it makes me crazy that if a rich person talks about their ideas for solutions, it's framed like they are nice people are some nonsense. If a poor person does the same thing, it's framed like they are nutcase revolutionaries or something.
I've studied certain things for a lot of years and have lived experience to inform my mental models and I'm flabbergasted that people are so openly hostile to talking about solutions. They just want to whine and when you propose solutions, they get all up in arms and try to shut that conversation down.
Why? I don't get it. Do people just like being miserable and sitting around doing nothing while waiting for the world to burn to the ground?
If someone comes to me with an idea for an idea of how to solve a problem in a space I know well and (as far as I know) they don’t know as well, my comments are likely to be at least 2:1 negative:positive. It doesn’t do them any good for me to tell them how awesome it would be for their idea to revolutionize the world. They already feel that. They more likely need to here where they’re likely to struggle or refine/test their idea before sinking thousands of hours into it.
Maybe that’s a possible underlying (positively motivated) driver for the negativity you experience?
Communication can be hard.
I’m pretty sure that channel got shut down but am pleased to think they have found others that still work.
If and when it becomes legal it’s a really interesting market.
It’s strange that
1) people think facebook is a good platform to do these things on
2) they don’t get shut down and handed over to the police
People keep asking for online surveillance to prevent this but in the places we already have it (eg. facebook) crime often isn’t stopped.
Do you mean the same police defeated over and over in the war on drugs should be dispatched to put a 70 years old grand'ma trying to make a few $$ selling an apple pie on Facebook.
People are not asking for online surveillance, elected (and non-elected) official are trying to put in place the level of surveillance you're mentioning to secure their power. But I totally understand that the barter economy is acting against their plan.
Facebook and Twitter also have angry mobs sending tens of thousands of death threats to reporters, random people, people why disagree with, etc. They are doing it publicly, and as far as I can see, not even those criminal cases are handed over to police. Why would mom-and-pop food operations with potential civil offenses be handed over to police?
And I really doubt Etsy has the clout to blackball anyone in the technology industry.
Go figure. Many people make food at home because they cannot eat the stuff produced commercially, or want a healthier alternative.
In the US, soybeans are ubiquitous in baked goods (vegetable oil is usually soybean oil), and they're a top 5 food allergen. It is rare to find commercially baked goods that do not have them.
When did getting food from strangers with ingredients you can barely pronounce become safer than from your neighbor?
The pronounceability of a name doesn’t make it safer. Compare dihydrogen monoxide (water) to dihydrogen dioxide (H2O2, a toxic chemical).
Every vegetable oil I've seen is largely canola oil.
A wide range of nice cookies and crackers get shipped out of Japan to the USA, individually wrapped and then sealed in a bag with desiccant, and keep perfectly well for months as long as they are in the package. As soon as you unpack them they go stale like everything else.