If you bake it, can you sell it? A ‘right to food’ movement grows.

Kara Donovan thought she had a good thing going when she started making money baking for friends and family in 2014. She’d always had a knack for baking sweet treats. She figured she’d use her hobby to earn some extra income for their house of six – herself, her husband, and four children. It was a good way to spend time with their kids before they started school full time.

Her small operation was successful. It helped them save money on day care expenses, too. Then someone in their community anonymously reported Ms. Donovan’s side gig. Officials with the state of Rhode Island – a highly restrictive state when it comes to cottage food law – shut it down. Under state law, only registered farmers are allowed to sell food made in their home. 

Ms. Donovan’s side gig of making pretty cakes and cookies, effectively, was illegal. It hurts, she says. Not just as a crafty baker who enjoys what she does, but as a parent and provider. Her family had gotten used to “having this little bit of extra income, whether the way I obtained it was right or wrong,” Ms. Donovan adds. “Then, all of a sudden, it was taken away from me.” 

But as Ms. Donovan was forced into renting out space in a local community kitchen to continue her work in Rhode Island, voters in nearby Maine were moving in a very different direction.

For years, food rights activists have lobbied for less stringent cottage food laws. That in some ways came to fruition in November, when 60% of Maine voters approved the nation’s first “right to food” amendment, enshrining it in the state constitution. Under the amendment, Mainers have the “natural, inherent and unalienable right” to produce, consume, and perhaps sell food they grew or raised. 

Proponents of the amendment described its passage as a direct challenge to a system centered heavily around large food corporations, as well as among the strongest efforts to date nationally to relocalize the food system. 

The Maine amendment comes at a curious time in how Americans feel about food. The pandemic caused a spike in food insecurity, with the challenges at one point encompassing more than 54 million Americans. And between isolation and bouts of unemployment, the pandemic also prompted many Americans to rethink how they obtain their daily food. Some took to the soil, with rows of tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers in their backyards reducing the need to hover around each other in grocery store aisles. Others hocked food to neighbors. 

Amid these shifts, some policymakers and thought leaders see a rising alignment between food security and the “food sovereignty” movement for local and individual agency. 

“I think a lot of people have started to wake up to how vulnerable we are as a society and in our own community to the global food system, a very unjust food system,” says Mariana Chilton, director of Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities. “And also, a lot of people were getting very excited about growing their own food or raising their own chickens.” 

A trend beyond Maine

The Pine Tree State isn’t alone in recent action to boost food sovereignty. 

Wyoming kicked off the trend in 2015, when the state legislature approved the Food Freedom Act, which allowed for the sale and consumption of homemade goods. North Dakota followed suit in 2017, when it approved a similar law. And in April, both the Montana and Colorado legislatures passed local food choice measures, easing regulations on direct consumer purchases.

The passage of food rights policy such as Maine’s is seen as a building block by some Americans who are seeking answers to food insecurity, particularly in the American South, where some of the nation’s highest rates of childhood hunger are found. Five of the top 10 states for childhood food insecurity can be found in the region, including in Arkansas (more than 23%) and Louisiana (23%), according to Feeding America.  

For someone like Sunny Baker, co-director of the Mississippi Farm to School Network, food sovereignty and food rights are interwoven. 

“School food, in some ways, is a right to food – it’s a right for kids to get free mails, or reduced-cost meals,” Ms. Baker says. “We saw in the pandemic how vital and important those meals were, especially as people started losing jobs in the economy.” 

In the nonprofit network she directs, a key goal is to connect local farms with schools, bringing locally grown fresh produce to children.

But if advocates like Ms. Baker are to push for their own policy similar to Maine’s in the future, they’re thinking carefully about the framing.

“We want to design it in a comprehensive way from the beginning, so that it does not turn into this cycle of perpetuating hunger with food pantries – or solving hunger in a silo, as opposed to as a part of this larger system of a better economy that is better serving all,” Ms. Baker says. 

More sovereignty, less safety?

Maine’s own right to food amendment arose from years of local food sovereignty work. 

In the early 2010s, several towns across Maine passed local ordinances allowing for direct (face-to-face) sale of homemade foods like jams to customers without government oversight. Complaints about food safety – a top concern for those opposing the amendment, alongside animal welfare – would be reserved for the seller. 

The local laws in Maine paved the way for a similar statewide law in 2017. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture was not shy in voicing safety concerns. Maine legislators eventually fell in line by excluding meat and poultry from the law. 

“A loaf of bread is different than a meat pie. You undercook a meat pie, and you could be sending people to a hospital,” says Diego Rose, a researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans who studies nutrition issues, including regulation of cottage foods. “It’s taken a lot of work to develop a food safety system that works pretty well. If you think about how much food 340 million people eat, and how you hear about outbreaks, it’s pretty rare that it happens.” 

On the surface level, food freedom laws are often distinct from the idea of food as a human right. The United Nations has asserted simply that “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.” 

Meanwhile, the food freedom movement is made up of an eclectic band of folks who often lack an ideological bond. Libertarians, alternative food enthusiasts, and back-to-the-land evangelists have combined in an effort to deregulate food production, often through cottage food laws. 

A building block for a future food system 

Food rights advocates say such deregulation doesn’t go far enough. Dr. Chilton and some food security researchers argue for including a right to be free from hunger or food insecurity. 

Such ideas have begun to work their way into the global consciousness. 

Food sovereignty concepts have spread across the globe in recent years. For example, for the past decade, so-called peasants’ movements such as La Via Campesina have asserted their voice against the agriculture industry’s role in free trade negotiations, which in turn promotes the dominance of industrial food production over locally grown, subsistence foodways. 

Ecuador is among many nations recognizing food as a stand-alone right. Its constitution states that “food sovereignty constitutes an objective and strategic obligation” that guarantees its citizens “self sufficiency in healthy food, culturally appropriate in a permanent form.” 

Many U.S. food rights advocates borrow from that logic.

In their eyes, a right to food amendment would ensure that every person has access to good, healthy, and culturally appropriate food that also contributes to sustainability – sustainable for communities that produce it, and for the environment. It would ensure that low-income communities own, and control, more of the food system they partake in. 

“People who are poor don’t have the time, they don’t have the land, they don’t have the private property in which they can grow their own stuff,” says Dr. Chilton. “I think that we need more provisions that ensure the conditions in which everyone has access to food, and that would be about ensuring the appropriate economic conditions.” 

In her view, while Maine’s amendment didn’t go that far, it’s “a great start.”

But even so, Ms. Donovan is still waiting for her own sense of agency. Rhode Island has yet to approve a broad-based cottage food law, though the state’s governor added it to the budget this year. 

“It blows my mind that we would be so against a thing that would bring small businesses together,” she says. “I’m losing time at home. I’m also spending extra money and in the long run, I’m not really making any because I’m paying out for rental space.” 

However, Ms. Donovan stresses how much she loves her work. It’s why she’s stuck with it, despite some of the challenges she’s met from both her neighbors and lawmakers alike. 

“It’s a lot of sleepless nights, because you’re working when the kids are in bed,” she adds. “We’re all just trying to do this thing. We love it. It provides a little extra for families to buy groceries.”