What I am about to write about is hardly new, but while I was in Chicago for the Enablon North America Users’ Forum, I was educated about Monica Eng, one of the Chicago Tribune’s food bloggers on the newspapers site,
The Stew.
As more entrepreneurs pursue their dreams of providing, fresh, healthy, local, and organic food, they often run into loggerheads with stubborn bureaucrats who will give a fast food restaurant a clean bill of health, but often treat small business owners with disdain. Health department workers stalked underground private chefs in Oakland and Berkeley; an up-and-coming ice cream sandwich purveyor cannot sell her goodies in Virginia unless its ice creams are pasteurized; and raw milk vendors are constantly harassed by government workers who are guaranteed lifetime employment no matter how poorly they may perform on the job.
Monica Eng profiled Chicago pastry chef Flora Lazar, who had stocked up on frozen purees based on fruit she purchased from a farmers' market and that she had prepared in a shared kitchen. Chicago’s Department of Public Health had decided that Lazar
did not have the proper license to turn the purees into candy and sell them. Long story short: you can watch the video of Public Health employees take over Lazar’s kitchen like stormtroopers, dumping bleach over thousands of dollars worth of summer fruit and berries.
Why Lazar could not simply take the fruit gelees home was never answered by city employees. The necessity of dumping bleach on frozen fruit, which only created a huge mess and a blob of chemicals that went to a landfill, was never accounted for either.
A few days later, inspectors returned and destroyed even more prepared food, which was about 300 pounds worth of everything from raviolis to cupcakes. Meanwhile, different city employees gave her differing answers as to why she was in violation of the rules. It is all especially galling when you consider that Lazar was being honest about her operations. During both pillage-and-bleaching operations, inspectors would not even allow Lazar to give any of her food to her son—and never actually said anything was wrong with the food.
In the end, Lazar lost about $6000 in product and suffered a huge setback to her business—all because
Chicago did not offer clear guidelines nor a coherent licensing process for businesses that work at shared kitchens: mostly small caterers, supper clubs, and pastry shops like that of Lazar’s.
Municipalities need to develop clear guidelines about when, how, what, and why a small entrepreneur like Lazar needs to do in order to run her business. And as long as imaginative chefs are transparent about where and how they prepare their food, they should not have to worry about being trampled over by small-minded city employees with huge egos and limited analytical capacity.
Special thanks to an Enablon employee who told me about this story.
