A thriving bakery in a home kitchen.
This shouldn't be illegal.
It was late October of last year and the first hints of snow were happening up in Northern Maine. Abraham and Maya were along for the ride and we’d been driving all day. The car went North from Winter Harbor where we’d been filming with Billy Bob Faulkingham, a lifelong lobsterman, and one of the authors of Maine’s “right to food” amendment. The amendment in combination with the Maine Food Sovereignty Act makes it legal for people to create small food businesses without government involvement. I wanted to see firsthand one of these controversial new businesses and I’d recently heard about a buzzing unregulated farmers market about 20 miles from the Canadian border in Stockholm, Maine. My research led me to young newlyweds. Nicole Ferszt had just started a small bakery and sold her bread at the market that her husband Jerry founded and manages.
My family knows I much prefer to take backroads, a habit that often leads to minimal traffic and late arrivals. As we drove up Highway 1, which extends from the Canadian border to Key West, I got curious about a yet more remote route. It turned out to be a bad choice- a very rough dusty dirt road for twenty miles, so rough we often slowed down to single digits to navigate what felt more like a mogul run. We eventually made it to Nicole and Jerry’s home, a half-hour later than expected, and we were all quite hungry. The kitchen could not have smelled better, as a homemade beef stew was simmering while Nicole removed many loaves of artisanal sourdough bread, often with parmesan cheese baked into it. She also prepared a traditional Quebecois bread, which resembled injera, the porous and spongy flatbread of Ethiopia.
It was Friday night, and the market was going to be the next morning. Before we ate, I got the camera, and filmed as Jerry planned out logistics, and Nicole packaged bread and put on labels. It was somewhat difficult to focus on filming, with the smells that filled the kitchen. We were all so excited to eat.
And this brings us to one of the central questions of the food freedom movement: Who would not want to eat this food Nicole had prepared? Who would think it was dangerous for me, as a father to allow my kids to partake in this meal?
Eventually, I stopped filming and we all sat down and ate this stew, which tasted even better than it smelled. And we ate some of the bread Nicole had baked. We sopped up the stew with the fresh spongy bread. No one would consider this a strange or dangerous thing to do.
After dinner, I interviewed Nicole and tired after a long, long day, the three of us drove to the Caribou Inn where we plugged in the car in the sub-freezing night, and got some sleep. The following morning in the gym of the Stockholm school, I filmed as dozens of food businesses just like Nicole’s setup folding tables and put out their food to be sold. None of these businesses had been inspected by the state. All of the people who showed up signed a waiver that said that they understood they were buying and eating food unregulated and uninspected by the state. Basically, everyone there was taking responsibility for their own food choices. And yet this was controversial, even considered dangerous by the Maine Farm Bureau.
I gave each of the kids twenty bucks and they went around and ate like kings. They got some of Nicole’s bread, doughnuts made with only maple sugar, lamb stew. It was so good. We bought more than we could possibly eat and even saved some doughnuts from Mom. Why is it that if someone has us over for dinner in an unregulated kitchen it is safe but the second we pay someone for that experience it becomes a danger? Nicole put it so well, that she trusts her neighbors far more than the food oligarchs.
Below is our fortnight film, a short portrait of Nicole. It is a rough scene from our upcoming documentary “The Right to Food”. It is available to people who value the work we do enough to pay us for it.
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Shout out to Jerry and Nicole for being such wonderful hosts, and to Jasmin for editing this. A short scene of Jerry will be unveiled next month. And to Abe and Maya, who are such wonderful kids and road trippers. And to all of you who are already subscribed to our Substack, Patreon or ThriveCart. Thanks, it means the world to our small independent company, Leave It Better.
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