While several counties<\/a> have opted into California’s micro-enterprise home kitchen program, Fresno County says its still exploring whether or not to allow it.<\/p>\nInside a Fresno kitchen, the stove is one woman’s office.<\/p>\n
She has been blind for more than 15 years. Despite her disability, she continues to cook.<\/p>\n
She knows every inch of her kitchen, and recipes by heart.<\/p>\n
“I’ve always been cooking all my life. I love to cook and I’m cooking out of my home,” she says.<\/p>\n
Before she lost her sight due to domestic violence, she owned a permitted Taco Truck.<\/p>\n
But after becoming blind, she says physical and financial barriers of operating a truck or opening a restaurant became impossible.<\/p>\n
Still, she never stopped cooking.<\/p>\n
“It’s easier for me to come and cook out of my home. It is easier. I rely on the money’s coming in because all I have is, of course, some handicaps, so I have to check monthly,” she said.<\/p>\n
And this is another source of income that I can count on to help myself to stretch out for the rest of the month.<\/p>\n
California now allows people to legally sell hot meals from their home, however, Fresno County, has not opted into the program.<\/p>\n
“There are concerns from cities like having to deal with complaints about traffic and crowding and neighborhoods. So there’s there’s any number of reasons why a county has not adopted it,” said Mathew Gore, a Supervising Environmental Health Specialist here in Fresno County Environmental Health.<\/p>\n
Signed into law in 2019, AB 626 gives the county full discretion to authorize MEHKO in their jurisdiction.<\/p>\n
For our accountability question, I asked if there are plans in the future to implement to help vulnerable people make a living.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been reaching out to other environmental health departments throughout the state and finding out what their experiences are,” said Gore.<\/p>\n
For now , if you’re looking to sell food in the county, it may come at a high cost.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes it’s not just not possible with what they want to do, but we really try to offer all of the different options as far as operating a restaurant, operating a food truck,” said Gore.<\/p>\n
Options many low income families simply cant afford.<\/p>\n
“The lower income families that are scared to go out there and get a business of their own. It’s not as easy as everybody needs,” she said.<\/p>\n
The county says food like jam and baked goods are allowed to be sold out of homes, but for hot meals, that door remains closed for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (FOX26) \u2014 A California bill is opening doors for home cooks across the state. Assembly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":{"0":"post-183879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fresno","8":"tag-fresno","9":"tag-fresno-headlines","10":"tag-fresno-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}