That’s how I like my police forces - following the letter of the law rigorously and robotically and not being bothered with thought or human judgement.
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So by your logic, we should put the five-year-olds in with GenPop. Fair is fair, after all, and everyone should be treated equal.
The Texas law states that beverages from a dry mix are OK and there’s even a handy infographic at http://texascottagefoodlaw.com/Resources/Allowed-Foods. This was just a simple mix of children irresponsibly mislabeling their goods (lemonade vs. lemonade mix) and the local police misunderstanding the law. Both parties should have known better (sarcasm!).
If you dig a little, there is some pure gold in that Texas Law e.g. What are pickles? http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/foodestablishments/cottagefood/#19
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As a precautionary measure, you may wish to take the federal course if you intend to sell pickles under the cottage foods law.
well, now i know
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@lolipop_jones @CarlMud @tymyrick @cleveremi @ShlomoGS @zieroh
(Sorry to reply this way, but it’ll end up clogging the thread (and also my brain) if I try to address what you all said individually. I don’t mean to lump everyone together as a blob, and I’ll do my best to address as many of your points as I can)
I actually agree with most of your points. I recognize the licensing system (in this case specifically, but also more generally) has problems with regulatory capture and barriers to entry. Entrepreneurial work is important to expose kids to, and can end up striking on a kid’s strengths early on, pointing out a talent that may sustain them for the rest of their life.
As I was posting my original comment, I started thinking about other cases where exceptions are made for children, and the reasoning for those exceptions. What immediately came to mind is fishing and its licensure requirements. In many places, children under a certain age are allowed to fish without a license, sometimes even without supervision or in the direct care of a properly licensed adult. For instance in Washington, children are allowed to fish on the Puget Sound waterfront and off the piers without a license as long as they’re 14 or younger (additionally they must keep a catch record and follow the law for the specific body of water e.g. they don’t get a pass to use barbed treble hooks in a salmon spawning stream etc). I’m fine with this arrangement, and honestly, it’s pretty cool. I fished a lot as a kid, and really enjoyed it, and I’m glad I wasn’t made to pay for the license.
I’m not sure it’s particularly comparable, but it definitely softened my stance. There’s still the point that selling food to the public could put people directly at risk with a product, while fishing is more private, and the concerns for licensing there are ecological, rather than for public health. But still, it’s pretty easy to get lemonade right, not make people sick.
Add in that the cops are pretty much wasting their time, and are really burning bridges in the community, and this is definitely a pointless act of enforcement, or rather the point is to stroke the cops’ egos and let them feel powerful over a couple of children.
If this were adults, I’d probably stick by my guns more, but there’s a case to be made for various exceptions, and I’ll concede the point there.
TL;DR, I voiced a gut feeling without really thinking about the other cases.
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have to confess though that I’m still a little bothered by[quote=“LDoBe, post:46, topic:59464”]
But still, it’s pretty easy to get lemonade right, not make people sick.
[/quote]
I just have this feeling that in my parents’ day, even if someone did get a little queasy from some front-yard stand lemonade, that they were able to just get over it, and not demand that the police power of the state be mobilized in future.
Those were the times before America was a Nerf Culture, where Life Itself is Foam-Padded For Our Protection, before we insisted that the Government’s Duty Is To Keep Us From Ever Suffering A Boo-Boo…
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I guess this story has a silver lining after all.
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Ummm… what?
These days you have to fill an emission report for every fart, and commission an environmental impact study when you want to take a dump. And you mod your house and have to get its changed value assessed. Bleh.
The papers are becoming sentient and are out there to eat us alive.
In terms of markup, that’s probably no worse than Starbucks.
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That’s part of what has caused cities to require registration for everything. There has been a trend since around the seventies to freeze or lower property taxes. Cities make up the shortfall by requiring registration fees for everything. That’s what I was getting at.
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Some people simply hate “property”!
I can understand compensating people for their skills and labor. But land is merely found and claimed, so generally it’s not like anybody actually did anything to warrant being paid.
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
–Anatole France
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“We were doing just fine until the cops came.”
Who doesn’t know that feeling?
Life in the U.S.A. babe(s) (and most other Plutocracies, not to mention Oligarchies, Monarchies, Kleptocracies . . .).
The earlier we learn the rules, the better. (We all have to get a little twisted or worse in childhood so we can be tough adults, take care of business, be driven, protect our interests and our families . . .)
At least it gets expunged from your juvi record when you are 18 in most states (I’m hoping Texas too, but if there were an exception . . .).
Personal responsibility is definitely important. I think that a lot of the reasoning (to be clear this is distinct from the actual reasons and motivations originally) that get trotted out for requiring food handling licenses for these kinds of very small-scale stands is due to liability problems.
Homeowner’s insurance has a lot of loopholes and escape clauses. For instance, pools typically require extra riders in homeowner’s policies, otherwise pool related injuries aren’t part of standard coverage.
Same goes for selling lemonade from your front yard. Insurance companies don’t want to deal with the hassle of making sure children are licensed and supervised for that kind of activity, and they definitely don’t want to pay out in the case of a lawsuit if someone who bought the lemonade contracts MRSA or C. Difficile from the lemonade. The old days were dirty. The old days had a lot of infections and disease, so people just dealt with it as a part of life.
Today this kind of situation where someone might get sick isn’t going to be handled by insurance, it costs the city money to handle the court battle, and emergency room time, and the enforcement is pretty cheap “papers please”. So what would be attractive to the city and the state is to just require that anyone handling food that goes to the general public need to at least demonstrate competence at safe food handling, get their cert and so on. And that dining establishments are properly insured and have the ability to cover these liabilities without shifting costs onto the city and state when something does eventually go wrong.
Can’t say that I like it. But it’s what we got now. It really boils down to personal litigiousness. With the rise in numerous lawsuits for minor stuff like injuries while not wearing a seatbelt, or for having an allergic reaction in a cafeteria, or dumping trash in people’s lawns, we’ve come up with solutions to the problems using the blunt tool of the state, rather than more nuanced tools of personal interaction, mediation and arbitration, and community consensus, which in most cases end up working out to have results that make the most people happy and satisfied with the outcomes.
Can MRSA or C. diff. survive the acidity of lemonade?
Let’s find out:
According to Here: Country Time Lemonade has a pH of 2.5
And this paper from Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy says:
vegetative cells of Clostridium difficile are killed within 5 to 30 min upon exposure to pH 2 to 3 buffers
So it looks like shitty powdered lemonade will kill even the most armored C. Diff cells, since vegetative cells are in a state of forming the tough environmentally resistant endospores in response to stressors.
The paper I cited is specifically studying bacterial rates of death when exposed to stomach acid at various pH levels, and with various additional chemicals (nitrates specifically). So while it’s not perfect, at least, holding all things equal, hydrochloric acid with a pH between 2-3 is effective at killing C. Diff. But that’s not the same acid as in lemonade of course, so there could be wild differences in the biochemistry.
Also, while the paper addresses MRSA, the closest numbers it has to Countrytime lemonade is pH of 1-2, an order of magnitude more acidic than pH 2-3. But nonetheless HCL at pH of 1-2 was very effective at killing MRSA, to the point where MRSA was undetectable after 30 minutes.
ETA, also this is all in vitro of course. Your milage will vary wildly in in vivo or ex vivo situations that aren’t held under lab controls. I’m sure temperature, oxygen, possibly even agitation and mixing and especially the human biological reactions to the presence of food/drink/microbes (and even the microbiome living in the gut’s reaction to the invaders) make a big difference as well.
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I want to make two points:
Point the first:
Big government advocates: meet big government regulations:
Point the second:
Did I really just read “if X is outlawed only outlaws will have X” on BoingBoing?
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Are you surprised by a writer here saying it unironically? I’m pretty sure Cory has polished that old chestnut plenty of times in a form something like:
“if general-purpose computers are outlawed, only outlaws will have general-purpose computers.”
or
“if information security is outlawed, only outlaws will have information security.”
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I have never observed such a thing- however, I don’t doubt the accuracy of your statement.
So is the statement: “When ar-15s are outlawed, only outlaws will have ar15s” true… in your opinion?
While I won’t put it past Texas to do that, at the same time $50/day is really nothing to someone doing a brisk lunchtime business. If that $50/day is put towards health inspections and the like, I’d be all for it; at least in the case of regular food stands, cart vendors, trucks, etc. And to be honest, I usually tend to think of the stuff in a kid’s lemonade stand to be a slightly risky thing to eat or drink, but I will still buy a lemonade from them. 
The kicker here is that this more than qualifies for cottage food sales, which are low-volume sales of homemade foods. Care really has to be taken with cottage laws to make sure that they don’t get exploited and then some clever jerk goes and gets around safety, labeling or claim inspections by taking advantage of cottage laws.
But, this ultimately comes down to our favorite thing here, powertripping and/or dumb cops. The way the cop seemed on this video was a complete “I AM ROBOT TAKING ORDERS” type attitude, with his orders being his limited interpretation of the law books. The cop didn’t have to shut down the kids, they get plenty of discretion in enforcing the laws. He did it clearly because he didn’t know much of the wording of the law or the spirit of the law.
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