Hello all, At least here in the metro Portland, Oregon area, all our county health dept food inspectors regularly check out the farmer's markets for selling the bottled sauces & food products, the vended food snacks & the meats and cheeses, etc for many food safety issues.
The sellers have to have food handler's permits ($10 registration after state test) & the cooked products have to be from a commercial kitchen as well, also licensed & inspected. The health depts also monitor any prepared foods sold to the public in other places, to make sure they follow these rules. That is why the Girl Scouts & the Campfire groups sell commercially prepared products. Several political action groups wanted to solicit home baked goodies & re-sell them to the public as fundraisers this past campaign season & the health depts sent them copies of the rules, with requests that they abide by them for public safety reasons. Before these contacts, none of the groups had even considered that they should check out food safety requirements as applying to their projected sales. Contaminated food is no laughing matter -- just look at resulting dozen or so deaths & the hundreds of others who were sickened but recovered, in the current Salmonella outbreak from all those peanut products!!! KMC -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090226/c0256fa2/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
