Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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Every state except New Jersey now allows home-kitchen cooks to make and sell non-hazardous foods with a low risk of causing foodborne illness such as baked goods, jams, jellies and other items that do not require time and temperature controls for food safety.

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)?

Check out forrager.com (idk why they spell it wrong like that) if you’re interested in starting your own cottage food business. They have a database of laws for every state and a whole bunch of helpful info to get you started: what you’re allowed to sell, who you’re allowed to sell it to, allowed venues, annual sales limit, etc. And there are people who can answer just about any question you could dream up. I was able to get set up in my state for less than $100 and a few pages of paperwork.

Thanks. I will check it out.

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.

https://agr.wa.gov/cottagefood

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.

Thank you. I'm pro gig work, though I hate things like Uber and DoorDash where so much of that is dependent on you having your own car and adding more traffic to the roads and all this.

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?

I wonder if the last point is not so much hostility but black-hat brainstorming of what could go wrong, particularly if your counterparty believes they have some experience that you don’t have.

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?

Oh, there's no doubt many factors/explanations.

Communication can be hard.

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