Returning to their roots

It felt like the meeting of a secret club as participants followed the shelter signs into the basement of downtown Lansing’s Capital Area District Library. In a large storage room, the walls were lined with tables bearing a buffet of culinary items for the September gathering of the Mid-Mitten Homemade Food Swap.

It’s not a potluck or a farmers market, but something in the middle. Some came as far as 80 miles to trade items like maple vanilla coffee syrup, apple pies, egg rolls and fruit-infused vodka. There were about 20 swappers, some bringing as many at four different menu items. Some brought 10 or 15 items.

“People here like to be generous,” said Bath resident Candace Winslow, who brought homemade goat cheese. “They’re not finding the cheapest thing to take to the potluck.”

Food swaps hit the nation about 15 years ago, sweeping New York, Dallas, San Francisco and Chicago. Now they´re in Lansing. Home cooks, small business owners and grandmothers come to gatherings with goods they’d made or harvested. The food can be preserved or raw. The packaging of some is polished and chic. On others, it’s rustic or thrown together from that morning.

Food swaps are part of an underground food movement that operates outside the arm of food regulation laws, taxes or licensing. No inspections or licensing is required. Nothing is being sold, so the food doesn’t even have to adhere to Michigan’s cottage food laws. A spokesperson at the Michigan Department of Agriculture said they’d never heard of food swaps and didn’t immediately know how or if they would be regulated in Michigan.

The free event is considered a private affair — you have to sign up to participate.

“In order to be within the laws of sampling and purchasing and selling, it has to be considered a private party,” said organizer Danielle Welke (also a contributor to City Pulse).

Swaps are still relatively new in the Mitten State. Grand Rapids has an active group, meeting monthly. Royal Oak seems to have sputtered, with nothing posted on Facebook page in a year and no new events publicized. There are intermittent postings online about Ann Arbor gatherings. But the Mid-Michigan Homemade swap has been meeting monthly since February. Its final swap of the year will be Saturday in Mason.

The person-to-person exchange works on an honor system. Swappers must list their ingredients and tell as much about where the food comes from and the process to create the dish as possible. Safety has been a concern in some states. When a San Francisco group grew from dozens to hundreds of food swappers, the health department shut it down, saying it was too large to be considered private and thus needed more safety rules in place. In Lake Tahoe, Nev., a food swap was closed in 2011 by the county health department.

“How are you tracing who is bringing what?” was one of the questions the county asked the swappers, said Jessica Phillips, a founder of the Slow Food Lake Tahoe food swap. “If someone did get sick from the food swap how would you identify what it was and who brought it?”

The organization chose to close the swap rather than be subjected to regulations by the county. Her argument was simple.

“I´ve never gotten ill eating at a friend´s house, eating at home, or at a neighbor´s house eating cookies,” she said. “But I have gotten ill eating at a restaurant licensed by the health department.”

Welke emphasizes that swappers must tell each other what is truly canned or what needs to be refrigerated.

Phillips said Nevada County also took issue with the terminology of trade and barter.

“Trade and barter are still considered a form of commerce that can be regulated by the government,” she said. And trading is considered taxable commerce.

Swaps help promote food rights and the right to food as a basic life need she said.

“It´s kind of hard times for everyone,” Phillips said. “Money isn´t coming easy to a lot of people. The share economy and trade economy will continue to rise. People are getting smart about how they are using or spending their resources.”

She said in her area, ski swaps (trading and upgrading ski equipment) are becoming big.

“We realize how wasteful we´ve grown and how wasteful we’re accustomed to being and maybe it isn´t sustainable,” Phillips said.

Welke said she started the Lansing-area swap with pure foodie intentions.

“There are a lot of people who are not interested in starting a business or making money,” she said. “They are just interested in cooking or baking. They’re doing things I would have never tried to do. I kind of take it more like apolitical. I’m not interested in starting a new economy, although that would be great. I’m interested in people who are meeting who would have never met.”

Ben and Heather Cohen attended the last Mid-Mitten Homemade food swap, driving 80 miles from Sanford, near Midland where they own a small farm. They also run a business, Small House, which makes handmade oils and flour. They brought hemp seed oil, sunflower oil and almond meal, and provided samples of hemp flour bread, which people dipped into the oils to taste.

“I’ve always wanted to come to an event like this,” Heather Cohen said. Their table was decorated with their marketing materials, detailing the benefits of the oils and the process they use.

“This is perfect,” Ben Cohen said. “What we do in our home is essentially what’s happening here, just on a bigger scale. It’s nice to be around so many like-minded people.”

He said the swaps connect people in ways our forefathers interacted before grocery stores.

“This is how people tried new food, trade and barter,” he said. “Money is nothing. Everybody is richer for this experience.”

Mid-Mitten Homemade Food Swap

Noon-1:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9, Capital Area District

Library, Mason FREE, but pre-registration required midmittenhomemade@ gmail.com