Shareable Food and the Law

From Shareable here’s a really comprehensive and interesting article on innovative ways that people are sharing food.

The Health Department didn’t show up when I made dinner for my neighbors last night. Fortunately, our health and safety laws don’t usually dictate how we prepare food in our personal and private realms. But humans have a natural tendency, an urge to feed each other, and the shareable food movement is taking that to new levels – levels that bring up some legal curiosities.

“The Underground Food Movement” has become a thing lately. It’s a foodie’s utopia in Oakland these days, where I’ve snuck off to meals at “underground restaurants” and sampled urban homesteaders’ goat cheeses and preserves.

But this movement goes deeper than its sheer yumminess. We thrive on food. When we share in efforts to grow, process, prepare, and serve food, we greatly enhance our abilities to eat well, provide for ourselves, and build livelihoods around food. Sharing food is particularly important during hard economic times and many small food projects develop out of unemployment.

The realm of shareable food is flourishing with community meal sharing, potlucks, gift-economy restaurants, community food growing projects, food swap events, pop-up stores, stone soup gatherings, food-buying cooperatives, goat-sharing, chicken cooperatives, events like The Big Lunch, and so on. Plus, restaurants step aside! A handful of start-up companies are creating peer-to-peer platforms to help people feed each other. Check out Grubly, Munchery, Gobble, and EatWithMe which connect chefs with foodies and/or catalyze community food events.  More…

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1. Rise of Collaborative Consumption
2. Hyperlocavore Site
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