Posted on 02/01/2014 12:06:21 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A government official appears at a man’s door. The man has been breaking the law: He has sold bread baked at home.
This isn’t a page from Kafka—it happened to Mark Stambler in Los Angeles.
For decades, Stambler has followed traditional methods to bake loaves of French bread. The ingredients are simple: distilled water, sea salt, wild yeast and organic grains. Stambler even mills the grain himself. To make it easier to steam loaves, he built a wood-fired oven in his own backyard. Stambler’s loaves came in first place at the Los Angeles County Fair and the California State Fair.
Soon after that, Stambler got the idea to expand his hobby into a home business, which became Pagnol Boulanger. Word of mouth spread. In June 2011, The Los Angeles Times profiled Stambler and his bread in a full-page feature.
Unlike his bread, that profile was bittersweet. He was busted the very next day. As he described it, the health department “descended like a ton of bricks on the two stores that were selling my bread…they could no longer sell my bread.”
An inspector from the health department even showed up at his doorstep to make sure “no bread baking was taking place.” For the next 18 months, Pagnol Boulanger was forced to go on hiatus....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
/johnny
You need too keep your mouth shut. His waterloo was when the newspaper ran the story about him. Never do anything to attract the attention of Government Bureaucrats if it can be avoided.
A rare situation where CA law has superseded FL law in liberty, with the latter being more restrictive. In FL, the limit is $15K, inspectors can come into your home if there is a complaint lodged, and no internet sales are allowed.
Good thing he didn’t refuse to bake bread for a gay wedding reception then he’d be in REAL trouble.
And these laws are the corporations’ way of squashing would be competitors.
Point taken, but how feasible is that when you have a popular product? your only other choice is to sell the stuff in dark alleys like bootleg gin during prohibition: “psst, buddy you got any bread?” “whats the password?” “pierre sent me”
LOL
CC
Need a bounty on Bureaucrats.........
Yep, nor wholesale sales either.
You will be surprised how effective word of mouth is, but you are correct.
It is relevant to point out the reason such regulations have been put in place. Here’s a partial list of food poisoning outbreaks in the US since the 70s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foodborne_illness_outbreaks_in_the_United_States
If we went back into the late 1800s and early 1900s the list would be much longer and deadlier.
Our food supply is so safe nowadays we tend to take it for granted. But people used to die all the time from contaminated food. That they don’t today is very largely because of food safety regulations.
Not trying to say that every regulation is necessary or properly enforced, only that bacteria are amazingly sneaky and can be very deadly. There are very good reasons to make food production for sale to the public not something that is undertaken casually.
password? “I’m a little flaky croissant”
Very true, and most bureaucrats are inherently lazy also.
Utterly ridiculous. Food was not mass produced before the 20th century. For mankind’s entire history food has been homegrown. The only difference today is the government protects food monopolies.
What’s the password? “take your bread and baguette”
CC
Utterly ridiculous. Food was not mass produced before the 20th century. For mankind’s entire history food has been homegrown. The only difference today is the government protects food monopolies.
They also fund them with EBT.
And the unions' too.
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