Legalization Is Just the First Step
By: Matt Jorgensen
Tags: Labor, Social Justice, Food, Nonprofit

O ur Real Work Begins Now

The legalization of home cooking in California was a major milestone for our movement, but our work is really just beginning.

With the passage of AB 626, and other states already drafting similar legislation, we now have a rare opportunity to define norms and standards in a new sector of the food industry from scratch.

Home cooks with existing informal businesses are ready to legalize. Others are now considering turning their passion for cooking into an entrepreneurial opportunity. Consumers need healthy, affordable food options, and neighbors are hungry for meaningful interaction and connection.

These communities and stakeholders are the ones who should drive and benefit from this new home cooking sector from day one.

We believe that home cooking business can become a new way to empower and connect, rather than commodify and extract. We are deeply committed to helping cooks retain greater dignity, equity, ownership, and voice than they have traditionally found in the food industry.

In 2019 we will focus on:

1.) Labor Organizing and Advocacy: We will continue to serve, first and foremost, as a voice for the cooks in this movement. We are collaborating with other nonprofits, co-ops, and companies working to empower cooks and promote de-commodified food. We will help expose and reign in efforts that put profit before people and planet.

2.) Cook Training and Resources: We are developing a food entrepreneurship training program for home cooks, which will include permitting and support in starting a food business. We’ll also provide access to micro-loans, lines of credit, liability insurance, and other resources.

3.) Food Policy Leadership: We are working with cities and counties in California to support implementation of The Homemade Food Operations Act. We’re also leading a national academic consortium to develop cook-centric model legislation. We’ll provide advocacy advice and tools for allied groups running bills in other states.

Our work will evolve as the new home cooking sector begins to unfold. We fully expect this work to continue to be messy, complicated, and take all sorts of turns we cannot predict now. So our strongest conviction is that our priorities must continue emerging from the collective wisdom of as many stakeholders as possible.

Our Underlying Convictions Remain the Same

Though the DNA of our new organization is just beginning to take shape, our thesis/mission still contain two underlying tenets:

1.) Revaluing Care: Consumer capitalism encourages us to value commodified products over people and planet — to transact, rather than interact. Revaluing Care means remembering how to care for ourselves, and others, as whole humans. It means ensuring that our true needs are not subordinated to the false empowerment of “winning” in the market. It means working to address “market failures” like food deserts and displacement from gentrification.

Cooking can nourish us holistically — connecting us with our neighbors, bridging socioeconomic divides, and building power in local economies. Home cooking supports healthy affordable food access, community food sovereignty, cross cultural exchange, and mutual support among neighbors.

2.) Redistributing Opportunity: Our current legal and economic systems benefit those with wealth and social power at the expense of those less empowered. Redistributing Opportunity means remembering that histories of oppression have created opportunity gaps that we must consciously dismantle. We need to actively ensure that new economic and legal structures don’t become new ways to extract from and criminalize the most vulnerable.

Cooking is a fundamental tool for economic empowerment, but meaningful work in the modern food industry is highly exclusive and unattainable for many. Home cooking can create equitable and inclusive opportunities for the people who need them the most — building dignity, agency, and ownership for all food workers.

We Need Your Help

We expect the next year to be challenging, but incredibly formative. The C.O.O.K. Alliance is looking for committed and enthusiastic home cooking advocates to join us as partners. Together we will help shape the norms and standards of this new home cooking industry over the next 5, 10, even 20+ years. To that end, we are beginning to form subcommittees, an advisory group, and a Board help co-design our approach and hold us accountable.

Our Board will be particularly central in determining our priorities and organizational blueprint in the critical year(s) ahead. We hope to assemble a diverse group of cooks along with other food, labor, and health policy experts who can make an ongoing commitment to supporting this work over the next twelve months. If this sounds like you, we would love to have you!

Please fill out this form to nominate yourself, or someone else, for the C.O.O.K. Alliance Board.

Finally, we want to thank our 2018–2019 Board and all of you who have contributed in ways big and small thus far. We’re excited for what’s next.