Maine lawmakers are contemplating a set of payments that will develop and enhance the state’s already good meals sovereignty legislation. However some unlikely foes oppose the modifications.
As I detailed in a 2018 column, Maine’s meals sovereignty legislation, adopted in 2017, permits native governments within the state to choose in to the state legislation by passing an area ordinance to exempt many direct-to-consumer meals gross sales from burdensome state licensing and inspection necessities.
The meals sovereignty motion started to emerge in Maine a decade in the past in response to an absurd state legislation that required farmers who wished to promote as little as one rooster per 12 months to spend tens of hundreds of {dollars} to slaughter and course of the chicken. Supporters of the legislation, me included, take into account meals sovereignty an instantaneous growth on the freedoms of Mainers and their proper to financial alternative.
Thus far, no less than 86 cities and cities have opted in to the state’s widespread meals sovereignty legislation. That is a fourfold enhance from 2018.
Presently, two amendments to the legislation are being thought of. The primary, An Act To Make clear the Maine Meals Sovereignty Act, would get rid of the present requirement that every one gross sales should happen as “a face-to-face transaction… on the website of manufacturing.” That change would enable transactions as a substitute to happen theoretically between consumers and sellers outdoors a house or farm and permit such gross sales to happen on-line, over the telephone, at a farmers market, or in another direct (fairly than simply face-to-face) method. The second, An Act To Present Equal Entry to the Advantages of the Maine Meals Sovereignty Act, would require counties to permit unincorporated areas inside their borders to make the most of the meals sovereignty legislation.
Because the Bangor Each day Information reported just lately, these modifications are supposed to “make the state’s native meals financial system stronger by growing alternatives for unlicensed home-based meals companies.”
Not everybody helps the amendments. Whereas opposition to those meals sovereignty amendments is coming from predictable foes—the state’s bigger, licensed meals companies—it is also coming from a shocking quarter: Maine’s farmers markets. They’re fearful that gross sales of uninspected meals will give farmers markets and their distributors a nasty identify.
“I feel there’s numerous worth for a person to be acquainted with the best way meals is produced and to know if it has been produced in a facility that does or doesn’t meet meals security guidelines,” Mark Guzzi, president of the Maine Federation of Farmers Markets, informed the Each day Information. “By limiting the positioning of sale to the positioning of manufacturing, you’re permitting customers to have a greater understanding of the place and the way that meals is produced [when the purveyor is unlicensed].”
Guzzi’s fears are unfounded. First, the variety of farmers markets in Wyoming has grown by 70 p.c since that state’s groundbreaking meals freedom legislation took impact. (Meals freedom legal guidelines are inherently higher than meals sovereignty legal guidelines as a result of the previous decontrol many meals gross sales all through a given state, whereas the latter apply solely within the cities and cities which have opted in by passing an area ordinance.)
Second, there have been no studies of any foodborne diseases attributable to meals offered underneath Maine’s 4-year-old legislation. The exemplary food-safety document of Maine’s legislation tracks with the experiences underneath Wyoming’s meals freedom legislation and the rising variety of such legal guidelines in different states.
The entire absence thus far of any reported circumstances of foodborne sickness attributable to uninspected meals offered underneath meals sovereignty and meals freedom legal guidelines isn’t the cause these legal guidelines ought to exist. In any case, we do not enable, say, floor beef to be offered solely as a result of it is by no means sickened anybody. It has.
However the lack of foodborne diseases is actually proof that critics of meals freedom and meals sovereignty had been improper after they predicted these legal guidelines would have a destructive impression on meals security. As a substitute, the food-safety successes thus far of meals freedom and meals sovereignty legal guidelines ought to trigger fair-minded folks to ask whether or not present federally mandated inspection processes actually make meals—and customers—safer.