Institute For The Future

The Right to (Local) Food Risks

 

Local food activism typically involves demanding healthier food as part of local services, attempting to create healthier, more connected local food supply chains, or, at times, both. Now, it apparently also involves the right to eat foods that pose a risk.

 

Or, at least that seems to be the underlying contention of a group of farmers in Sedgewick Maine, which passed a "food sovereignty law" which appears to grant its citizens the right to buy and sell raw milk, slaughter chickens on each other's property, and otherwise sell food that may not be in line with local health regulations. In effect, the ordinance

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proposed that "Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing." These would include raw milk and other dairy products and locally slaughtered meats, among other items.

 

This isn't just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, "It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance." In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

 

What about potential legal liability and state or federal inspections? It's all up to the seller and buyer to negotiate. "Patrons purchasing food for home consumption may enter into private agreements with those producers or processors of local foods to waive any liability for the consumption of that food. Producers or processors of local foods shall be exempt from licensure and inspection requirements for that food as long as those agreements are in effect."

 

 

 

 

Not being a lawyer, I can't speak much to how legal an ordinance like Sedgewick's might be--though it certainly sounds like something that won't hold up under scrutiny. But this idea--that "patrons…may enter into private agreements…and waive any liability" around food seems to be rapidly emerging as a new form of local food consumption, even if, unlike in Sedgewick, it hasn't been linked to activism.

 

In Washington D.C., for example, people can go to a "taco speakeasy," which is really just someone's home, and buy mole in a sort of gray market transaction. In San Francisco, a cookie seller was recently put out of business by the Department of Health for selling cookies from a string out of her window. Also in San Francisco, the San Francisco Underground Food Market, which sells foraged and home-produced foods, has turned itself into a club to avoid legal challenges.

 

At first glance, this trend is a bit hard to make sense of. After all, most of us like the fact that we can, with a pretty high degree of confidence, bite into an apple without worrying about food poisoning.

 

What's notable about all of these examples, though, is that they involve extremely small scale actors finding themselves caught up in regulations aimed at large scale food makers. Put differently, these are people whose small scale exchanges are much closer, emotionally and socially, to having dinner with a friend than they are to anything involving multi-billion dollar business. And if you get food poisoning at your friend's house… well, you probably won't go back again for dinner. Regulations, in that context, would really be secondary to personal trust.

 

My broader point here is that more and more people seek to use food as a means to connect and build local communities, we're also likely to see more examples of places where expectations for local control are out of whack with a regulatory system built for global trade. In other words, don't be surprised if you see a lot more tiny towns like Sedgewick.