I’d liberalize some food prep for sale laws.
There used to be very little regulation of food production, which led to the sort of nightmare that Upton Sinclair wrote about in his book The Jungle (which described the horrors of the Chicago meatpacking industry). As a result, there was a huge public outcry, and rightly so, standards and inspections and sanitary conditions were required.
However, those went a little too far in some cases, perhaps egged on by big-time producers who want to prevent competition from the little guys by making the regulations too onerous to comply with. For a long time, if I wanted to make one loaf of bread each week for sale to my neighbor, I still had to have a multi-thousand dollar, inspected, commercial kitchen to do it in. (This has been somewhat eased in my community if I sell very small scale, and put a notice on it that the bread was baked in a home kitchen.)
That local easing-up of bakery production, however, doesn’t cover things like home canning, jam making, cheese, and similar. You can’t do the natural thing and start small with what you already have, to gain business and practical experience. You have to start big and hope you don’t fail. So smaller entrepreneurs may not have the resources (or desire) to even try. This seems wrong to me.
As such, I’d lift some of the more burdensome regulations on micro-scale food production and sale, as long as the consumer knows enough to be aware of what they’re buying. Once you get to a certain size, perhaps at a certain dollar level of sales or when you start not selling to each end consumer individually, you do need to have some kind of inspection going on. But many small producers would never get so big as to need that, and a plethora of mini-farms and micro-producers would go a long way towards making a better food system for everyone.
