There have been two stories about food this week that have raised my ire.

First, at a community garden workshop held by Growing Hope, I learned that the local "Plant a Row for the Hungry" campaign raised 10,000 pounds of fresh produce from local gardeners. That's a lot of food! Now, the largest part of that actually comes from the State's Huron Valley Women's Correctional Facility, where gardeners donated their entire harvest, of over 7,000 pounds of produce. Why the entire harvest? Because the prison's contract with their food supplier wouldn't let them use the food grown on site in the prison's kitchens. Of course, the food wasn't wasted, because Food Gatherers was there to take it, but I had read this weekend that the State of Michigan spends 1/5 of its general fund on the correctional system - about as much as it spends on higher education. It is ridiculous that the State was so incapable of being flexible that it couldn't use the food onsite.

The second story was in the Ann Arbor News today, of a sting operation by the State Police. The crime? Giving unpasteurized milk to people who drink it for health reasons. Move over, medicinal marijuana - we've got raw milk to worry about! A cooperative of local residents arranged to buy cows and pay a farmer for lodging, because you're allowed to drink raw milk from your own cows, and arranged for periodic distribution at Big Ten - but the Michigan Department of Agriculture set up a six-month long investigation of the crimes of selling "misbranded products", such as unlabeled milk bottles, and of selling unpasteurized milk out of a retail establishment. Despite test results declaring the milk in question safe, the MDA's Director states that, "whether the milk was 'fine' depends upon one's feelings about unpasteurized milk." Well, yeah! And here are people who know that they're getting unpasteurized milk, and who are fine with that! In fact, they prefer it! They've bent over backwards to find a legal way to get it, and the State saw fit to spend six months setting up ridiculous grounds for raiding the cooperative and seizing thousands of dollars of food and equipment.

It is depressing to read about grassroots, personal efforts to get good food squashed by official stupidity, but at least I have some good stories to use now.