Are Bake Sales Legal? HB46

Those concerned about the Safe Food Act will want to read the full text of Virginia House Bill #46 here:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB46

Although this bill commendably guarantees that holding bake sales and packing honey are still legal, it doesn't say anything about selling produce.

Specifically, it doesn't guarantee the legal right of property owners to sell the nuts that grow wild in many Virginia woodlots. Chinkapins, black walnuts, butternuts, and hickory nuts are native to Virginia; European chestnuts don't seem to do as well as the American chestnuts that used to dominate our forests, but the trees do bear fruit where they've been planted. What all our native nuts have in common is that they come in thick shells that add a lot of bulk and weight and are a nuisance to remove. City dwellers and out-of-state visitors will pay good prices for these nuts if they're shelled, but are hardly willing to haul them off if they're unshelled. Where's the provision guaranteeing our right to shell our nuts so that people will buy them?

For that matter, what about the right of fruit and vegetable dealers to "prepare" fresh fruits and vegetables? A primary reason why some people, like me, buy junkfood is that junkfood is available in clean, convenient forms. We don't have to wash sweet, sticky juice off our hands after drinking soda pop or eating a candy bar. Our natural instinct may have been to eat a piece of fruit instead, but eating fruit in its natural form tends to be messy. I personally don't want to touch a peach, apple, or melon until I can peel it, slice it onto a plate, eat it with a fork, and wash the knife, fork, and plate...so if I'm on the road, I'm more likely to buy something that's less healthy and that probably wasn't even made in Virginia.

And, how do parents get kids to eat more vegetables? What my parents did was have an organic vegetable garden. A taste for cooked vegetables takes a long time to acquire (I know people in their fifties who have yet to acquire one), but children naturally like the taste of raw lettuce, spinach, carrots, asparagus, peas, corn, cabbage, and even green beans and potatoes, when they're free to rinse organic vegetables under the hose and eat them right in the garden. Children might even consider buying raw vegetables as treats if the vegetables were cleaned and cut up for them.

Health-conscious types (hello, Grandma Bonnie Peters) think we'd see slimmer, perkier young people if we marketed more wholesome food and less junkfood. Because their own preference for wholesome food is a personal choice, they seem unaware of the extent to which protectionist legislation influences other people's choices. Requiring all food suppliers to pass inspection tends to be a sneaky way to prevent people from entering the marketplace as food suppliers...for instance, in Tennessee it's now a crime for people to sell food they've prepared at home if their kitchens have doors that open into the rest of the house and allow children to run in and out. The result is that fresh organic food becomes very hard to find and very expensive. And more people eat cheap junkfood. The Safe Food Act should have been titled the Extremely Expensive Groceries Act.

I'm quite sure vendors would sell more healthy, low-calorie, natural Virginia produce if they had a legal right to peel and slice fresh fruit and vegetables at the point of sale. Maybe this issue is addressed in a different piece of state law.