Town forces boys to stop selling cupcakes

[Noahbuddy]

|main5|3|link3|26878 The police told the kids to stop selling cupcakes. A councilman tattled on them. oooo, big criminals.

[The Daring Dufas]

Interesting points in the article about how the kids could never obtain a permit because a two hour permit costs $175.00 and they would have to have a million dollar insurance policy. That law had to be passed by somebody, hummm, let's see could it be town board members like the jerk who called the police? It would be interesting to find out how many of those permits are issued.

TDD

[trader4]

In CT, the health authorities just stopped a chili fest that a fire company was having to raise money. They said you can't sell food without it being prepared in a licensend, inspected facility. That would seem to apply to the above situation, bake sales, church dinners to raise money, etc too. Interesting because there obviously are a lot of these all over that don't get busted. Most likely because no one busts them rather than that they are exempted from the law. I don't recall any of them causing food poisoning though. That seems to always come from one of the commercial, licensed places.....

[Ed Pawlowski]

The kids were running a "for profit" business on town property. Everyone feels sorry for the poor kids, but how would they feel if Dunkin Donuts opened a mobile stand there? In the eyes of the law, there is no difference. This was not a fund raiser, it was money for their pockets. Now they learned what real businesses have to do.

[George]

Sure, when I think of food poisoning I think of the big box industrial places who pay walmart wages not a volunteer organization where the folks are putting their everything into making good food to help pay for the stuff they need to help the community.

[George]

Exactly, let everyone know the hoops the government makes folks who operate businesses jump through. A friend opened a new location and he still doesn't have the certificate of occupancy after two months because all of the inspections are done according to when the government employees get around to it and then they discover extremely dangerous conditions such as signs thet were mounted 1/4" lower than specified which require another inspection and then another.

[aemeijers]

2-3 times a month, one group or another of local Church Ladies has a bake/knit goods sale in the lobby of the cafeteria of the federal building I work in. Nobody cares. But several of the local rental meeting halls had to padlock their kitchens (formerly an available option on hall rentals) because they were set up with residential grade appliances, plumbing, flooring, et all. PTB wanted them to upgrade to commercial kitchen specs. But the kitchens attached to most of the local church multipurpose rooms (I see them when they have their tag sales) don't seem to be commercial spec either. Not sure what the criteria is- in a town this small, whose ass you kiss is probably part of it.

I always wondered what the people who run the building I work in would do if some non-mainstream church, like the Moonies, or the fellows in the orange outfits, wanted to have a bake sale.

I think it would be pretty hard to give anybody more than a case of the trots with any baked goods. Now someplace selling dishes with meat or uncooked egg products, I might be a little more leery of. As much as I love the food in bars (they always seem to have the best burgers), you never want to look in a bar kitchen. I've never seen one that wasn't tiny and very scary.

[HeyBub]

A similar thing happened in Houston a few years ago when a group representing a chili-cookoff contest complained that the city health inspector was burdening them with absurd regulations.

"Like what?" asked one councilman.

"Well, he insists that all the cooking be done in a tent," replied the chili man.

"We require a covered cooking area," volunteered the city health inspector. "One reason is to keep insects from dropping into the food."

"That just shows he don't know nothin' 'bout chili," interjected the cook-off connoisseur, we PUT insects in the chili! Ain't nothin' like a few fire ants to add a little flavor..."

"I give up. Cook whatever you want," said the health inspector as he left the hearing room.

[LouB]

LOL

And remember many, many regulations are there because some business wanted to protect itself from competition so they "paid" some politicians to make some rules. OTOH some of those rules do protect the public from various things. There is NO easy answer.

[Kurt Ullman]

Mostly they are to protect the bureaucracy from getting grilled when something goes wrong.

[Jon Danniken]

And it's bloody well about time, too!

Jon

[Molly Brown]

Insurance, license, permit, workers-comp=85=85. Now you know where the money for Girls Scout Cookies goes and why the new generation doesn=92t know how to bake.

[George]

I think you identified two things that have nothing to do with the original post.

You may remember a few years ago a retired woman who had a business background and who was a troop leader wondered why her troop received so little from their huge cookie sale proceeds. She did her homework and found out how much the cookies costs etc.

Turns out that the girl scouts organization is a huge enterprise filled with highly paid do nothing staff based in a building that looked like Government Motors headquarters. One of the investigative reporting shows (maybe 20/20) did an expose on them and showed that the lions share of the money went to support the huge office building and staff.

The interesting part is they took a look at the boy scouts and found pretty much nothing in the way of an organization with most everything done locally.

As far as knowing how to bake I don't think the government requires a license to bake stuff for your own consumption. Some people appreciate quality and bake stuff and some folks like the consistent mediocrity of big box goods.

[FatterDumber& Happier Moe]

There is a reason things are the way they are, food prepared and offered or sold to the public included. A health dept. license is required to sell food to the public, and with that comes the regulations concerning facilities, approved sources of ingredients, labels, proper food handling during food preparation, approved storage and time/temp requirements. This one seems innocent enough but what about the guy who decides to grill hamburgers in his garage and sell them in the front yard, or the restaurant that opens with out a food service licesne and without running water supplied? It's all been done, and lines have to be drawn somewhere, it's always fun until someone loses and eye. How many let their kids eat homemade food they got while trick or treating?

[JimT]

Cupcakes are a gateway dessert. They had to be stopped.

Jim

[Noahbuddy]

"Jon Danniken" wrote in news:ic8opl$ob8$ [e-mail]:

hellooooooooo, I just baked you a dozen cupcakes.

[Joe Carthy]

Next, they'll be going after lemonade stands. And kids trick or treating for UNICEF.

[Robert Green]

>>> cops-speak-out/?icid=maing|main5|3|link3|26878

You wouldn't think that peanut butter could kill someone, but lace it with salmonella and voila!

The health codes are generally responses (too late) to serious food poisoning events. I used to live across the street from a food truck vendor and based on what I saw, I am glad inspectors are out there doing their work. Spending two years in the restaurant industry and watching Kitchen Nightmares further convinced me that you can't inspect some places often enough. My friend's mother was health inspector and she never ate in any of the town's Chinese restaurants, citing inspection horror stories like the guy who pressed his ducks between two sheets of plywood with his Cadillac or the "That's NOT chicken, it's pigeon." In China they raised their own ducks and chickens and now, the only birds it is legal to raise in city limits are - you guessed it - pigeons! It's not that they are evil, they are just adapting to our culture.

I now tend to gravitate to places like Quizno's and others where you can see the food being prepared. I suspect that as county governments slash their spending, we're going to see a lot more food poisoning cases because inspections are among the first thing to get cut back.

Food safety's been in the news lately. The Republicans and Democrats that live in food producing states voted against even discussing a bill to expand the FDA's reach in the waked of recent nation-wide food poisoning events.

WASHINGTON - The Senate voted 74 to 25 on Wednesday to consider a bill to improve the food safety system. One Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, joined Republicans in opposition to debating the measure.

While I believe the Feds are the number one strangler of small businesses, I do believe that I want someone looking over the shoulder of Big Agra and Big Meat to make sure they don't kill me or my family. I wouldn't want to live in an inspection free "honor system" country, although I am sure to some extent I do. The relationship between corporations and consumers has to be mediated, just like any other sports contest. (-: I fear the FDA can kill a company with a meritless recall and that there's no mechanism that can prevent that from happening if there's really a serious public health threat and they're *almost* sure they know the cause.

-- Bobby G.

Veteran short order cook, Roy Rogers burgermeister, IHOP dishwasher, ad nauseum

[Kurt Ullman]

So you can see the e.coli on the lettuce? (grin).

Not information in this to say if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Actually most of the major problems that the FDA looks at (since premises inspections are largely a local responsibility) could be taken care of by the simple expediency of irradiating most foods.

[Jay Hanig]

Back in the late 70's up through 1988 I operated a scuba shop. We rented a commercial space in a strip mall and went to work putting up partitions so make the space suitable for our purpose. We tried to do thing right and had the building inspectors come around like we were supposed to do. Right off, the building inspector didn't like the fact that we used ordinary 2 X 4s for the base plate of our interior walls; he wanted pressure treated lumber since it lay on top of a concrete pad.

Well, he came up with an alternative since the walls were already up... let us have the base plate sprayed with insecticide thoughtfully provided by his brother (or brother in law, I can't remember) for a not insignificant fee.

Well, we did everything all those inspectors asked of us but then they dragged their feet in issuing a certificate of occupancy. No problem: we opened anyway. Just ignored them. The base plates never rotted; in fact we never had any structural issues. I occupied that spot for 9 years without a certificate of occupancy. Oops.

After that I learned if I had small jobs not likely to attract attention to stay the hell away from the building inspection department. I just hired guys who knew what they were doing.

Jay