Bored and looking for something to do this summer, Danny Doherty hatched a plan to raise money for his brother’s hockey team by selling homemade ice cream.
But a few days after setting up a stand and serving up vanilla, shaved chocolate and fluffernutter to about 20 people, Danny’s family received a letter from the Norwood Board of Health ordering it shut down. Town officials had received a complaint and said that the 12-year-old’s scheme violated the Massachusetts Food Code, a state regulation.
“I was surprised and upset,” he said of the letter that came Aug. 5. “I don’t understand because there are so many lemonade stands and they don’t get shut down.”
Danny’s mom, Nancy Doherty, who had encouraged her son to start the stand as long as he donated half of the proceeds to charity, also was taken aback.
“Somebody complained. That was the most disappointing part for us was that somebody thought it necessary to complain about a child’s stand,” she said. “It seemed a little, you know, crazy if you ask me.”
Listeria happens when machines aren’t cleaned properly, ie: completely stripped down, which is unlikely to happen in a home-based operation. I mean it’s not like they had 50 ice cream makers on the go to make millions of dollars - like Boar’s Head deli meats (July 2024), Rizo-López Foods cheese (Feb 2024), and in Canada Danone’s plant-based milk (Aug 2024), and Maple Leaf’s 2008 deli meat debacle that resulted in 23 deaths. None of those companies were shut down because of their lazy oversight.
Well, it fucking sucks and it’s not a nice fuzzy answer but… the US is deeply corrupt. I’d prefer this ice cream stand be shut down and Boar’s Head also fail a health screen then everyone just do whatever.
The rules aren’t being evenly applied but I’d rather we enforce them more than relax them all to the lowest common denominator.
ETA: I absolutely get your frustration here and I share it.
Instead of issuing the shutdown notice, they should have sent someone out there to check up on the process the kid was using. That would have been very easy to do, and made the operation safe if it wasn’t.