New Food Companies

I spent most of Tuesday at the Making It In Michigan Conference in Lansing MI. It is an annual event that showcases the state's food entrepreneurs and their products - Yum! But more than a treat for the tastebuds, it's a testimony to the grit required to take a good (food) idea and get it into production - even if that production is small and local. The Product Center at Michigan State University helps people through the maze of regulations, laws, requirements and business issues that - in all honesty - they probably don't even want to deal with. They just want to make their product.

I have no issues with people being held to standards that ensure that their products won't kill others. But it seems that we've gone into overkill. How many times have you been sickened by eating at another person's home by their bad preparation of something? I suspect the answer is "0" to very infrequently. I'm not talking about ingesting something you are allergic to, but bad cooking skills or bad food products.

People who enjoy cooking for others seem to be a group that care that their audience both enjoys their food and comes back for more. So I would suspect they are pretty competent in terms of keeping people healthy who eat their food. Now I understand that scaling up production has a challenges, however I really wonder if every individual hoop that these food entrepreneurs had to jump through was really absolutely necessary....might food be less costly if regulation were less? Did regulation become necessary because food processing/production became a business? Hmmmm.....

Happiness

I love simple pleasures and an author who captures them for me is Verlyn Klinkenborg. Here a taste...

Hickory Rain

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: October 18, 2010 in the New York Times

It can be hard to explain where happiness comes from. But come it does.

Food for thought...

There is an assumption that says that food should be cheap. Ideally to feed the masses, but as it turns out, the process of making food inexpensive has enriched a few (companies like Monsanto that patent seeds, for example), impacted our health and environment and made a global business out of a fundamental human need.

Eating isn't optional. The link between garden (or farm) and table, should, in my opinion, be as short as possible for a host of reasons. Carbon footprints, freshness and nutrition are all good reasons for a distribution chain with fewer links. Increased connection to the seasons and the "terroir" of various foods, as well as the specialness of items only available in season are others.

When anyone anywhere can have anything anytime, what is "special" anyway?