This past June, Maine legislators passed a law that allows cities and towns in the state to adopt laws permitting farmers and other food producers within their borders to engage in a host of direct-to-consumer food sales. The law, intended to bolster local food economies in the state, allows Maine municipalities to “regulate by ordinance local food systems,” and requires the state, in turn, to “recognize such ordinances.”
While the act was intended to protect people like the “one-cow farmer who feeds the people in his community the food they want to eat,” its protections had limits.
“The law does not cover sales outside a given city or town that has a food sovereignty ordinance in place,” food policy expert Baylen Linnekin wrote in a column shortly after the law passed. “Neither does the law pre-empt federal law.”
And it’s that latter area that got Maine into hot water with the federal government, before the law ever took effect. Linnekin explains.
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