Just another example of our government trying to protect us from ourselves....

Linda

Seems like it's a case of a little operation being unfortunately caught in a net meant for big operations.

And the officials quoted in the piece seem more than willing to change things so it isn't a problem anymore.

As a guy in the piece said - we have bigger things to worry about. I highly doubt church suppers across the nation are under siege from the "big bad government". My MIL has been baking for church suppers and bake sales for better than 50 years and has never had an issue like this come up.

It'll get fixed, I'm sure.

Lisa

Its just as bad in Indiana. One of our local soup kitchens always gave away bags of food during the holidays. The community always baked pies and cakes to add to the bags. We are talking 800 pies and 800 cakes. Some of our schools Home Ec classes would make a project out of it as well as individuals. The state put a stop to that this past year. Now they can only accept frozen pies and cakes from grocery stores. Needless to say, donations were down greatly this past year. Very sad.

Linda

Uh oh! This may solve the unemployment problem, if they hire enough inspectors to cover every bake sale in PA.

I can't walk past a bake sale without buying something. I am willing to run the risk that it is uninspected.

Shoot. I cook in my home for a soup kitchen too. Does this mean our SK, which feeds 80 men who wouldn't have access to a decent meal otherwise, is going to close? Yikes, I hope not

This is a stupid law and, I agree with Lisa, it'll get changed soon.

Of course, just being 'stupid' doesn't necessarily mean it won't stay on the books. Afterall, it's illegal to harm a whale in Utah & that definitely qualifies as 'stupid'. So, be careful the next time you're in Utah. Me? I brake for whales!!

Connecticut's not much better...here in order for a pickle to officially be considered a pickle, it must bounce. The state is short-funded this year though & I've not seen an inspector bouncing pickles around my Stop-n-Shop recently.

Pennsylvania has other 'unusual' laws that officials should concentrate on rather than harass ladies baking pies, IMO. For instance, in PA...

Any motorist driving along a country road at night must stop every mile and send up a rocket signal, wait 10 minutes for the road to be cleared of livestock, and continue. If inspectors still have time on their hands after enforcing this rocket thing then they should address this law...

A special cleaning ordinance bans housewives from hiding dust & dirt under a rug in a dwelling.

So, you see folks, the entire thing reminds me of that Peter, Paul, & Mary song, "Have You Been To Jail For Justice?"

Goes something like this...

You law abiding citizens, come listen to this song;
Laws were made by people, and people can be wrong;
Once unions were against the law, but slavery was fine;
Women were denied the vote and children worked the mine;
The more you study history the less you can deny it;
A rotten law stays on the books til folks like us defy it;

The law's supposed to serve us, and so are the police;
And when the system fails, it's up to us to speak our peace;
It takes eternal vigilance for justice to prevail;
So get courage from your convictions;
Let them haul you off to jail!

Let's all make a pie & donate it this weekend!

/tricia

UGH!!!! Isnt there some roach infested restaurant he should be closing???

Christine:
You may have to be careful what you Post on the CF.

It seems like everyone is overwhelmed with negative things,
that are transpiring here and world wide.

Like they don't want to hear anymore.

I personally would like to hear everything, even if I heard it 100 times over.

After my " Food for Thought " post, I said to myself,
" I'll never do that again "

As for the Cake Sales :
Our Ladies Auxilary of the VFW , holds them to raise monies,
to buy toys for the Children in the Pediatrics Ward,
of a Local Hospital
and to buy items for Packages sent to our Troops in Irac.

I hope this doesn't put a crimp in the Cake Sales.

Isn't there other " Priority " things to check out.

If anyone has any other info on Pa. Inspectors and Cake Sales,
Please post it,
so I can inform the our VFW Post

I'll contact our Ladies Auxillary about this.

Thanks, Lou

I think this is a case of the "letter of the law" being a good thing but the intrepretation getting out of hand.
As someone who does a lot of cooking and organizing others to cook in a church kitchen I feel qualified to speak on this.

A couple of years back our pastor agreed that we would cook and sell a dinner for 1000 when RAGBRAI came through our town. There were 20,000 hungry bicyclers stopping over night and the planners wanted to be sure there was fo0od to feed them, soe very church, lodge, scout troop, cheerleaders, football team....everyone looking to make a buck was out to feed the hoard.
The possibilities for un refrigerated chicken salad and warm cream pies was amazing! So the inspectors came with their instant read thermometers and checked everything....hot food was to be hot and cold to be cold! One church that had vats of spaghetti and meatsauce at room temperature ( this was July...that room was warm!) got shut down.
You would be surprised at how stupid people are! "Why do I have to put the chicken in the refrig? It's been cooked..."
Once one woman cane into the kitchen and asked what she could to...I said "Wash your hands and go help the prople who are making sandwiches."
She said "Wash my hands? I just took a shower".
So the law has to be....but people need to learn how to get aroubnd it. We never "sell" a meal....well rarely and luckily we have not been inspected in several years....but we accept donations, or memorial gifts.
I am free to make a huge bowl of salmonella infected chicken and serve it to anyone I inviet in, but as soon as I try to sell it, I am in big trouble.
I think this was a case where the individual inspectors were at fault....they could have "looked the other way".
Linda C

The sticky issue is probably the "selling" to the public. You can probably give baked goods away in PA, but collecting money throws your group into another category. I'm wondering if the concern wasn't really over the cream and meringue pies. Like linda says, you'd be amazed at how ignorant people can be when it comes to food safety and cleanliness. Personally, I never purchase home made food items at public sells, not even home made dog treats!

I buy baked goods, jams and jellies whenever it suits me, and I like the uninspected stuff best, LOL. I figure the baking kills most germs, and it's impossible to kill someone with jam/jelly, and I won't eat it if it's moldy.

I do draw the line at cream pies, pumpkin/custard type pies, homecanned low acid vegetables even if pickled. Those are the things that could cause a lot of trouble.

Here it's legal to sell food only if prepared in an inspected kitchen, but I've yet to hear of an inspector enforcing that.

As for old/stupid/antiquated laws, there's a lot of them everything. The thing is, it takes legislation to repeal them and days/months of legalities. I'd rather my politicians be doing something useful (if that's possible), instead of spending time and my tax dollars finding antiquated laws that no one enforces or cares about just so they can repeal them.

Annie

The food police are busy here in CA. The Mennonite ladies sold baked goods (breads, cakes, pies & cookies) at the local farmers market. The State Food Inspectors made them quit. We sell breads, jams and jellies at my church's bazaar. I buy and donate all kinds of goodies. Where is everybody's common sense?

I was watching s program on the history channel today and they were talking about commercial food processing.

One point which caught my attention was that in commercial food processing when you are making products by the ton it is nearly impossible to prevent a minor amount of grease from the machines to get into the product. The official solution is to grease the machines with "Food grade grease"

In another portion of the program they were showing the USDA on sight inspection laboratory in the processing plant and they pointed out that there is an official limit to the amount of hair or Rat Feces that can be present in the final product.

With that in mind, i think i would sooner take my chances with foodstuffs that were prepared in a home kitchen by someone who actually cares about what their making, LOL

The USDA official limits to bug parts and rat feces (and WHO KNOWS WHAT ELSE) were established when inspectors told manufacturers that they had to "list" bug parts and poop, etc. as ingredients in their products if they existed! To mitigate that embarrassment, a minimum was established that did not require listing. Much the same as a minimum Trans Fat today slips through as zero. Makes you wonder what really gets into our food in our own kitchens -- probably more than the USDA minimum in some homes. On that happy note, I'm going to muck out my refrigerator and clean my kitchen!

If I was high risk (i.e. pregnant, toddler, diabetic, etc) I would pass on the home made goodies and either donate money or find something store bought that is probably there. But we all have to be responsible for what we put in our own bodies or that of our children or pets. Just because it is in a restaurant doesn't mean it is clean,. When I was a kid there was a grist mill in our community. They were struggling but they had a quality product. The new health inspector was so proud to site them when he found 'ingredients' spelled wrong on the bag. The actual word 'ingredients' He made them issue a recall on the product. What the......? They went bankrupt every employee, was laid off. (I think there were 7) Now what in the world would that have hurt anyone? I wonder what effect this will have on the food network's call for people to have bake sales for hungry children. I have seen time after time where stupid laws prevented the less fortunate to benefit from something that would otherwise be discarded. In no way do I have any conspiracy theory about the government, but I wonder how many of these laws are really meant to protect the average citizen and how many were generated by lobbyists lining the pockets of those in the position to make laws. Just like those peanut processing facilities in Georgia and Texas. Trust me they were unsanitary a long time before it was brought to light. I would bet my now pathetic 401K on it that people were paid to look the other way. Many laws say this effects businesses with more than so many employees or only if you have this sale more than so many times a year or if you a dollar volume of so much. Bake sales, car washes, block parties, school carnivals, church bake sales, they all help the community and are a way to bond with your neighbors. We used to adopt a resident at a local nursing facility and all year do special things for him. We would cook for them and bring treats that they longed for (as long as it met dietary requirements) no more, governemnt says no.

I've been complaining about the percentage of "particulate matter" in commercially prepared foods for as long as I've been a member here, which has been a lot of years.

Yes, every can you get from the store has some amount of hair and bugs and droppings and fingernail clippings and whatever in it. It's safe to eat, just disgusting to think about. That's why I grow an organic garden and do my own canning.

We won't start on the "cides". That's the pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides what whatever else that gets sprayed onto the food while growing.....

Annie

When it became public knowledge that people could have a hallucinogenic experience by licking certain toads (I'm not making this up--the venom of Bufo alvarius, the Colorado River toad, contains hallucinogenic elements), the ever-vigilant legislators of South Carolina outlawed toad licking. SC became the first state to do so.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted the result of overweening regulations nearly two centuries ago in 'Democracy in America':

"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose...

Oh yes.