Monday, May 23, 2016

Intransigent Transience in California

I've recently begun the process of opening a home bakery. I've been baking my whole life, and recently quite a few people have asked me to bake for their occasions. I filled two paid orders, and the state of California requires that I do all the paperwork to fulfill a third. The environmental health department requires labels for every product I'll sell, but it's a fully custom bakery so I don't know what I will sell. That means I have to cover all the bases, and that's a mind-boggling number of permutations.

Californians are the first to jump on "health" food trends: juice cleanses (do more harm than good), superfoods (not really that super), organic (misnomer and misguided), etc. The ones that affect my bakery are gluten-free (very few people actually have gluten sensitivity), milk-free (legit; sources vary but ~75% of the world population and 25% of the US population lose the ability to digest lactose after weaning), and egg-free (religious, moral, or sometimes health-related). This is making my life very difficult at the moment.