Who’s Afraid of a Neighbor’s Pie?

A slow and steady shift is simmering in kitchens across America, and it is not fueled by a new recipe or a new cookbook. Moving from state to state, lawmakers are telling home cooks that they can sell baked bread, raw milk, a plated meal, and even a roasted chicken, to anyone who wants to buy it, without having a commercial kitchen license first. Yes, they can cook and sell their food. For people who are quite done with Big Food, this shift is not a lifestyle trend. It is a wonderful sense of freedom as the government finally gets out of the way.

The momentum behind the movement is exciting. According to the Institute for Justice, which has helped write and pass many of the laws—called cottage food and food freedom laws—that make this endeavor possible, 34 states plus Washington, D.C., have created or expanded homemade food laws since 2015. In fact, every state in the nation now allows some form of home-based food sales, with New Jersey, the final holdout, finally relenting in 2021 after a lawsuit. This shift represents a rapid, bipartisan transformation that happened under the radar while many of us weren’t paying attention.

Wyoming started the shift with its Food Freedom Act over a decade ago. Passed in 2015, it remains one of the boldest laws of its kind in the nation. The law states that a home cook in Wyoming can sell almost any homemade food, including perishable and refrigerated items, prepared meals, even raw milk and homemade dairy, directly to a willing buyer, without needing a license, inspection, or permit, and there is almost no sales cap. Several states have eagerly copied Wyoming’s model in whole or in part, including North Dakota, Montana, and Tennessee, whose own Food Freedom Act has no dollar limit on what a home producer can sell.

The effects of cottage food and food freedom laws on a community are endlessly positive and profound. Think about it … a widow with a delicious pie recipe and a lifelong love for baking can earn real money. Or a small family farm can sell eggs, raw milk, and raw honey at the end of their driveway without needing to hire a lawyer first. Shopping in this manner also means that our grocery dollars stay right down the road, in the hands of someone we can look straight in the eye, instead of vanishing into corporate headquarters a thousand or more miles away. After all, that is the whole promise and point of buying local, and these laws finally make the small version of it simple and legal. Indeed, by pulling power away from a bureaucracy of red tape and giving it back to ordinary people and their neighbors, we are all handed a choice that a grocery store chain can’t offer.

How? For starters, if we want bread made without seed oils, eggs from pastured hens, jams with no high-fructose corn syrup, and/or produce not sprayed with cancer-causing toxins, this offers a choice. Under these laws, we can seek out the neighbors that provide these nourishing foods and confirm their practices by asking them in person, rather than trusting a label written by a marketing department. Sure, nothing about a cottage food and food freedom laws guarantee the food is clean. A home baker can freely use bleached flour and factory-produced eggs, but for the first time in decades, it has become easy to find and verify the producers who don’t use what you’re looking for. The industrial shelf at the grocery store offers us no such conversation.

Like anything we put into our bodies, the obvious worry is safety. And it is where, in this movement, the opposition has planted its flag. Public health officials worry, and not unreasonably, that food made in a home kitchen carries more risk of contamination. As expected, those opposed to the freedom these laws offer point to perishable items, prepared meals, and raw dairy as the real hazards. The trade group for state health departments, called The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, has plainly warned that the growing shift toward homemade food that is exempt from inspection means more risk of foodborne-illness outbreaks to the general public. That is a reasonable concern and is one that deserves a closer look.

Alas! There is good news! The track record, so far, does not match the fear-mongering from the opposition. The Institute for Justice reports that in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Utah—the three states with health departments that track outbreaks—officials found not one single foodborne-illness outbreak tied to a food freedom operation. Nope, not one. These laws are not anything goes. Each buyer is told at the point of sale that the food came from a home kitchen that does not have to be inspected by the state. Labels must name who made the item and typically list ingredients and allergens. Under these laws, each state’s health department still investigates complaints and issues fines if warranted. Under the food freedom movement, accountability doesn’t disappear; it simply stops running through a licensing office and starts running from the cook to the person eating the food.

So, who really loses when our neighbor is allowed to sell us a cheesecake? It is not us. The losers are the ones who have long been propped up by the old rules. Big food companies lose the built-in advantage of being the only ones able to easily cover the costs of licensing and inspection, which, for years, shut small producers out of the market entirely. And the permitting bureaucracy loses its purpose, which was to stand between you and the neighbor who baked your bread. When you can buy straight from that neighbor, there is no longer a need for the middleman.

The industrial-scale food systems pushing for these barriers against home cooks are also the ones who, like clockwork, issue broad-reaching recalls, the salmonella outbreaks, and listeria scares that sweep across the nation all at once. Not only are the recalls devastating, but they are incredibly wasteful.

Yes, indeed. It is time to shift where we buy our food. A pie purchased from a kitchen down the road has never been the problem. These laws are not asking us to trust blindly. Instead, it is rather the opposite. Knowing exactly where our food comes from and who made it is something that a shrink-wrapped supply chain cannot offer. Thankfully, this time, the law is moving toward the small, the local, and the unknown. That is worth noticing, and worth guarding, before someone decides we can’t be trusted to choose to buy food from a neighbor in our community.