Food Security as a Cottage Industry
Sharon January 27th, 2009
It would be great if all of us had the luxury of putting our community’s food security needs at the top of our agendas, simply because we care. The problem, of course, is the need for us to meet other requirements - to make a living, get food on the table, tend our families, etc… One of the ways we can find more time for this project is to shift some of our income to local food security work. So what kind of jobs are there that allow you to improve your local food economy? How might you make a cottage industry niche for yourself that might simultaneously improve your family’s economic security in tough times, and also help your community maintain a food supply?
Now obviously if you and your partner already work two full time jobs, or you are a single Mom struggling to just get through the day, the last thing you need is a new business. But for the retired, underemployed, unemployed or for at-home parents who might need a little extra income, this offers the possibility of doing good and also keeping the wolf from the door.
So here are some jobs I can think of (I’m leaving out jobs as growers or raising livestock - I’ll do a post on growing and producing food for income next month during the Garden Design class) - I’m sure the rest of you can come up with others.
Let me be clear that anyone dealing with food is going to have to decide how they want to operate in relationship to food laws. Know your local food laws, and know how they are enforced. The recent Manna Storehouse raid suggests that we need to take care. I believe that many food safety policies do exist for a reason - but the fact that they so hugely prioritize the well being of rich corporations, who still can’t keep the food supply safe (witness the current peanut contamination and cyclical contaminations that show up every few months), that we’d be better off allowing more small scale food production. I personally don’t have a lot of problem circumventing the laws, or campaigning to overturn them, but I do want people to understand the risks.
1. Bulk food/local food sales. My friend Joy now operates a storefront that sells bulk foods, local dairy, cheese and eggs, and also makes homemade baked goods and sells sandwiches. Her place operates as a convenience store/sandwich shop and bulk goods store. That might be a little much of a project for beginners, but her example is timely because before she operated her storefront, she did bulk food sales out of her house, ordering bulk foods, repackaging them in smaller quantities for sale and recruiting customers. Her prices are a bit higher than my local coop, but I want her and her family to succeed. This is a great cottage industry for someone - or even for a couple of people at home.
2. Home baker - now food sanitation laws can make any kind of food production at home difficult - most states require certified kitchens, with equipment most of us don’t have. Some of us may have access to certified kitchens somewhere - we may be able to use them for a small fee or even barter for their use during times when they aren’t open, and then sell home-produced food. If you are going to work outside the law, the place where there are the fewest risks is in baking - it is genuinely challenging to poison people with bread. In addition, Amish communities routinely sell home baked goods outside the law, and are mostly ignored, setting a precedent that might be useful. So if you are going to try and set up as a food producer outside of a certified kitchen, I suggest baked goods. In fact, I’ve done this - when our CSA was in operation, we used to include Challah in our deliveries. At one point, we were baking 50 loaves of bread every Thursday, without legal approval. We were very clear with our customers - we were neither certified nor we were certified kosher, although we keep a kosher kitchen and take challah when baking. The bread was a gift, never mentioned in our literature, and not part of their purchase. We still could have gotten into trouble, but I mention this as a possibility.
3. Other cooking - basically, I think the “ratio of things likely to get you in serious trouble” runs this way baking is the lowest because illness from bread is unlikely. Homemade meals or “lunch bags”, delivered to neighbors or brought to a workplace are probably next lowest risk, particularly if you can simply have them pay you for “grocery shopping” enough to cover. I personally would not mess with selling dairy or home canned goods - just in case something goes wrong, but then again, I live in a state with draconian dairy laws. Find out what your local laws are and work with them - or know what you are risking working around them. If you have access to a certified kitchen, or can get some institution to certify a kitchen for the collective good, by all means explore these routes. We are going to need more people cooking - and this is a reasonable source of income.
4. Teaching food storage, preservation and food security. There are a couple of ways you could do this. One is through your local community college extension courses, another is privately. You might run classes out of your home or you might offer private lessons if the market will bear it - you go to their house and help them with their first canning attempts. You will probably need a fair bit of experience and some practice or credentials - my suggestion would be to teach the classes for free a few times through a local coop or health food store, as a volunteer, and then use that to leverage yourself into being able to charge. This will depend on the market and local interest - but it is worth a shot.
5. Canning on shares - if you can find a certified kitchen, what about preserving other people’s food for them? They could pay you, or they could give you a portion of the preserved food as part of the deal - which, if it was canned in a certified kitchen, you could then sell.
6. Produce sales - you talk to local gardeners who grow enough extra to want a little cash, but not enough to be worth setting up a stand. Find 5-10 of these and ta da - you pay them for their extra strawberries and sweet corn and you sell it, either from an actual produce stand at the farmer’s market or through a stand at your house, and you keep the markup. You can do eggs this way too, and even local crafts, soap, etc…
7. Food access expansion. When Eric and I were caring for his grandparents, his grandmother wanted very much to buy local, fresh food. The difficulty was that at first, she was nervous about driving to unfamiliar areas, and later, unable to drive herself. It was easy enough for us to pick up extra produce when we went to our local farmstand. And gradually we noticed that other seniors in our rural area had the same problem - they missed the fresh raspberries and really “chickeny” chicken of their youth, but trips to the farmer’s market were hard - they were often tired or relied on other people to take them shopping. Extra stops and out of the way areas were simply too overwhelming. So, for a time, we’d stop by and pick up extra produce for them too. Now this was a not-for profit thing, but the seeds of a business are there - either shopping on comission for those too busy or unable to get out, or transporting people to farmer’s markets or farmstands in order to increase demand for local food.
8. Set up pantries. I suspect there are some people out there concerned with food storage who have more time than money - they want to build food storage, but don’t have time to clean out space, set up a pantry and stock it. So you be the “provident pantry” dude. You volunteer to come over, clear out the shelves, place and pick up the bulk order and put it into buckets. You might also offer menus and suggestions for using food storage. I should note that I generally shy away from strategies that mostly involve serving the affluent, but in this case, I actually think food security is one of those things that serves everyone - everyone in the community is better off when people have enough to eat.
9. Teach cooking classes - teaching people to cook bulk staple foods and to adapt their diets to food storage and local eating is important work. If you haven’t taught before, do it as a volunteer a few times. Consider seeing if you can get local grant money from any organization to cover your time, so that you can offer classes for free for those who may need them but can’t afford to pay - many towns have budgets that might locate a few hundred dollars to pay you to help low income folks be able to make better use of low cost foods. These classes can be taught anywhere, though - through churches, out of your home, to teenage homeschoolers and even through workplaces.
10. Combine items, but don’t ”cook” them - there are plenty of grey areas here that might allow you to sell home produced foods, but without getting into the legal mess of selling cooked items. You can mix teas, spice mixes, beans for soup mix, make flour mixes for gluten free or specialty baking, make herbal tinctures (don’t do this unless you know what you are doing and are familiar with the laws about making health claims for herbal medicines), and otherwise take other people’s products and mix them without doing anything that can get you in trouble.
Ok, other suggestions? The reality is that with almost 70,000 jobs gone in just one day yesterday, a lot of us are going to need ways to do good work and make a living.
Sharon
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