Slow Food vs. the City of Chicago

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Slow Food vs. the City of Chicago
Behind the culinary times, Windy City bureaucrats crack down on canning and charcuteries.

By Robin Peterson


When Alexis Leverenz opened Kitchen Chicago five years ago, she knew her business model was new to the city: she wanted to rent a “shared-use kitchen” to small business owners like artisan bakers, preservers and caterers. She called the Departments of Health and Business Affairs & Licensing to make sure she could run it legally. “Both said, ‘Great idea, people are looking all the time,’” Leverenz says.

However, the city’s enthusiasm was short-lived. When her first client tried to apply for a retail food establishment license — which costs $660 and is the only existing certification for a food-related business — she was denied and told there could be only one such license per address, which Leverenz already had. For months thereafter, Leverenz and her client were shuttled between the departments of licensing, health, and zoning, each claiming another could answer her question about the license. “There was nobody addressing the situation,” Leverenz says. “For years we were operating under the assumption that we could and no clients could get their own licenses.”

Then one day in late January, the Department of Business Affairs & Licensing told her clients they must stop operations until each business had a license of its own. Two of Leverenz’s 13 clients, Sunday Dinner Club and Flora Confections, finally had their applications accepted, and two weeks later they scheduled a health inspection to complete the licensing process. But instead of granting approval as expected, inspectors “just started throwing food out,” says Leverenz — hundreds of pounds of local, organic fruit purees, cheese, granola bars, and baking ingredients, among other things, all tossed in the garbage and denatured with bleach.

“It came down to the fact that they didn’t have a piece of paper they were told all along they couldn’t get. There was nothing wrong with the establishment or the food,” Leverenz insists. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5897/slow_food_vs._the_city_of_chicago

[midnight]

1. Where is the common sense from the Department of Business Affairs and

licensing?