Against Fearing Home Cooks
On cottage food laws, suspicion, and disasters
Last week, this headline caught my attention, "Hobbs orders ADHS to implement 'tamale bill' to avert delay," since then, I've written over four thousand words spiraling around the issues of food safety, suspicion, and cooking for neighbors as disaster preparation. Last year Hobbs (the governor of Arizona) vetoed a similar bill, citing concerns about foodborne illness and the bill not providing "a strong enough mechanism to ensure home kitchens are free of hazardous chemicals, rodent or insect infestation, or that equipment and storage of temperature-sensitive foods are adequate, functioning, or even existent."
Rep. Alma Hernandez, a Tucson Democrat, said that vetoing was "criminalizing poor people for simply trying to make a living." Sen. T.J. Shope, a Coolidge Republican, said, "Not only was the veto outrageous, but to continue to push racial tropes of homes riddled with insect or rodent infestation, it will just not be tolerated in the year 2023." Not surprisingly, I agree with those sentiments. But there's more bothering me.
Writers and politicians speculated that the veto was a gaffe that Hobbs wanted to make right by quickly approving the bill this year, which included some updates, such as defining a home kitchen as a space up to 1000 square feet. As the bill's sponsor, Rep. Travis Grantham, tells a reporter, "It's just good policy."
Policy that, back to the original article, the Arizona Department of Health Services has dragged its feet on implementing since March when Hobbs approved it. Policy that, when I thought about it more and more, obscured something more profound and worse: Neighborly trust is low, and the government and industrial food system thrive off that breakdown.
On a recent episode of AnthroDish,
talks with Dr. Vikram Baliga about policymakers who keep systems inefficient. Baliga says, "There's always people that stand to profit from things not changing. I think that's always been true, and I think, unfortunately, probably always will be true."In a 2023 report, the Institute for Justice reached out to the states with the "broadest homemade food laws (California, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming) to request data on the number of complaints and confirmed cases of foodborne illness that could be traced to a food product sold under states' homemade food laws." Not a single state had a case of foodborne illness caused by cottage foods. "This research confirms that other states can— and should—expand their cottage food laws to include perishable foods and meals, and that they can do so with no threat to public health and safety."
In August, PBS reported, "A Boar's Head deli meat plant in Virginia tied to a deadly food poisoning outbreak repeatedly violated federal regulations." Nine people died, and fifty were hospitalized. And yet, I don't see Boar's Head facing the same suspicion that cottage food makers receive.
There is something sinister in the earnest lawmaker's rush to bring more foods into the legal fold. He's thinking of the people (women) making food to supplement their income, to make ends meet. Make this food respectable, he cries. Let the government help, he pleads. But there is no acknowledgment that homemade food is generally safer or as safe as what's in the store. There will never be enough proof of safety to change the minds of those who profit off keeping food made in factories.
All food used to come from a personal fire or your neighbor's fire. But there was (and is) a crusade in the U.S. to change that. In Perfection Salad, Laura Shapiro writes about the man behind the Aladdin Oven of the late 1890s:
Atkinson disliked seeing his cook make bread the traditional way, kneading it by hand—"I do not fancy paws and perspiration in my bread; the idea is unpleasant even to speak of"—and he introduced into his own kitchen a mechanical bread kneader, a mechanical bread raiser, and of course the oven. "Here are examples of bread which no human hand has touched even from the time the wheat was planted until it was taken from the pan in which the loaf was baked," he concluded triumphantly.
Perfection Salad is one of this newsletter's most quoted books, and is a gripping illustration of the reach of ideas that are a vast, stultifying, and unimaginative force in the making of modern U.S. food culture. The derision and disgust in Atkinson's quote really hit me. It's so dehumanizing. I wonder what he would think about food today being produced on a massive industrial scale. Many loaves of bread are untouched by human hands. Would he call it a triumph of progress?
Wendell Berry writes in The Unsettling of America, "…the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution." Our hands are clean of flour, but at what cost?
The bill is officially named HB2042 but nicknamed the 'tamale bill' after one of the most prominent foods the updated law would designate as legal to make and sell from home. Tamales have become personal to me after joining my husband's family over ten years ago. Michael’s family has a tradition (dating back at least 50 years) of making tamales in the fall. At Thanksgiving, a pot of red chile simmers on the back burner, and a group assembles to make tamales the next day. It takes hours of rotating work, even with four at a time helping. My mother-in-law, primarily, clocks countless hours preparing. Standing around her kitchen island, someone always says, "We should really sell these," and everyone laughs and shakes their heads. The feeling in the room, after spreading masa on tens of dozens of husks, spooning on the filling, wrapping it up, and placing it in a Ziplock, is that it's too much work to do for anyone besides loved ones.
I thought of starting this essay with an image of my mother-in-law's hands, which are always perfectly manicured in fuschia and burgundy tones, even as she mixes masa. But what does that prove? The idea that a kitchen where tamales are made is dangerous, dirty, or infested is laughable. All Hobbs' statement makes me think is that she's never made tamales before.
While writing about my state, disasters abound that fracture food systems. People are hungry in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Congo, and in the path of hurricanes Helene and Milton. Tove Danovich writes, "Your survival in a disaster is based on you and the people around you, because first responders cannot be there immediately." Survival can mean getting to know and feed your neighbors now.
The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. When a home kitchen invokes fear, doesn't that say more about what we think of our neighbors than any truth about cleanliness? My lack of trust in my neighbor’s cooking reflects a low confidence in my own capabilities. We, the people, are really remarkably capable of cooking everything and anything. Why am I more comfortable buying frozen tamales made by a corporation flown into my town than from the lady up the street? Who is the suspicion serving? Who profits when people are scared to eat food made by their neighbors?
Questions continue to swirl, these words will have to suffice for now: Get your beautiful paws into some food. Make bread or granola (or trade something you made with the friend who got super into bread making.) Look for who is producing food in your neighborhood. Consider that the disaster is closer, and eating during it perhaps more fixable, than our food system wants us to think.
The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.
Thank you for this reflection. I keep thinking of these cottage food/home kitchen laws when I see calls for more local/regional food processing capacity (for use by farmers, small food companies, etc.). I mean, yes, I do want more local food production, but also… I think I’d rather have food from my friends/family/neighbors than yet another consumer packaged goods brand. “Neighbor packaged goods” has kind of a nice ring to it!
Here in NYC the NYPD and sanitation workers ticket street vendors, or arrest them, and throw away the food they sell, both raw produce and anything prepared. They don't just take the food, they destroy it in a trash truck in a city where so many people are hungry. But also the city has over 20,000 people on a waiting list for vendor permits while only 5,100 presently exist.