Food Freedom Returns for the 2018 Legislative Session

A group of alpacas, fleeing from the Paparazzi

I'm excited to see that Marc Roberts has introduced HB 181, the Home Consumption and Homemade Food Act. I only recently noticed that the legislative session was in full gear, so I immediately jumped on to the website to the Utah Legislature to see what Marc Roberts was up to. It appears that HB 181 is currently in the House Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment Committee.

I immediately emailed my political junkie friends and then set about looking at the committee members. I cross-referenced the committee members with the map I generated last November to get a rough measure of how friendly this committee was to basic freedom. (I don't have any data that directly addresses support for past Food Freedom bills, so I'm using the jury issue I mapped out in November as a proxy.)

Here are the committee members:

Rep. Keven J. Stratton (R), Chair Rep. Carl R. Albrecht (R)
Rep. Stewart E. Barlow (R)
Rep. Joel K. Briscoe (D)
Rep. Scott H. Chew (R)
Rep. Susan Duckworth (D)
Rep. Stephen G. Handy (R)
Rep. Timothy D. Hawkes (R)
Rep. Michael E. Noel (R)
Rep. Derrin R. Owens (R)
Rep. Douglas V. Sagers (R)
Rep. Scott D. Sandall (R)
Rep. Christine F. Watkins (R)

I color-coded the list like I did my former map. So, red means supportive of freedom and blue means hostile toward or wary of freedom. (Again, based on the proxy measurement. I'd have to do a lot more data gathering to get a really good measure of how friendly these representatives are to food freedom.)

The results of this exercise aren't encouraging. Although the committee chair being on the side of freedom is encouraging, the committee overall looks poised to summarily dump HB 181. There's not much we can do about that, but what we can do, we should do. So, I quickly drafted an email to one of the Representatives highlighted in blue. I recommend that you do the same. If you happen to live in the Representative's district, make sure to let them know that you are one of the people they were elected to represent. (I'd love to hear from you if you happen to hear back from a representative. I love data and original source material.)

In the process of writing the email, I learned some exciting things. Wyoming has expanded its food freedom legislation. In addition, Wyoming is not the only state to have enacted food freedom legislation. In mid-April 2017, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum signed HB 1433, the North Dakota Food Freedom Act, into law. While I'm disappointed in Utah for failing to lead on this and other important issues, the evidence being gathered, from yet another state, on the benefits of food freedom, may help Utah to follow suit.

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