This is the end of Off-Ramp. The final episode. Really, we mean it. You won't have Off-Ramp to kick around anymore ... until 2013.
Cottage Food Act, new for 2013, lets home producers sell their goods, cuts red tape
( To help producers get permits, baker Mark Stambler and LA County's public health department are hosting a public meeting. It's Saturday January 5th at 1pm at the Silver Lake Library.)
Most states allow people to make and sell food from their homes with minimal regulation. Starting Tuesday, California joins them. Off-Ramp played a small role in getting the "Homemade Food Act" passed.
We need public health laws to regulate food. I mean, you don't really want Grandma making pork sausage at home, smoking her Newports, with who-knows-what on the cutting board, and the cats jumping up on the counter. And you sure don't want her to be selling it.
But Mark Stambler, an amateur baker in Silverlake, says bread is a different story. "Bread always tops the list of not potentially hazardous foods. Because there's nothing in it that could harm anybody." A couple of years ago, Stambler visited Off-Ramp to talk about his homemade bread ... bread so good it won a blue ribbon at the state fair. The LA Times picked up the story in 2011 and mentioned that Mark was baking bread at his home in Silverlake and selling it to a couple of local restaurants. That's when the flour hit the fan. Someone from LA County Public Health showed up at his door and told him to stop. As Mark learned, "If I want to sell bread in a store anywhere in Los Angeles County, I basically have to own a wholesale food processing facility. Period." That could cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In stepped Stambler's Assemblyman, Democrat Mike Gatto, angry about red tape hindering small business and the growing cottage food movement. "I think that's sort of what gives government a bad name and was very dismayed at what he was going through," Gatto said. "In many cases these county ordinances or these state laws were put in place in the 1920s."
While those laws kept food reasonably safe and prevented Grandma from selling her trichinosis treats, they also prevented people from making and selling a long list of safe homemade food: dried fruit, nuts, herbs and pasta; fruit pies and jams; mole paste; honey; peanut brittle and toffee; vinegar and mustard; granola ... and bread. Food that in 30 other states is already okay for small producers to make and sell from their homes.
So why not set up a legal framework to let it happen here? Angelo Bellomo, director of Environmental Health at LA County Public Health told us he was all for it. "We don't exempt them, I would never suggest you exempt them from the food safety laws, they do need some form of regulation if they're a commercial enterprise; but we've gotta do it in a way that does allow these new ideas and these novel approaches that are clearly in demand, allows them to operate and to operate safely."
Among other rules, Assemblyman Gatto's Homemade Food Act requires cottage food producers to take a food safety course and create proper ingredient labels, imposes a small fee for a permit, and limits the amount of money producers can make. Gatto says, "What we're trying to do it strike the right balance between getting rid of 90% or 95% of the really onerous nonsensical regulations but still having a county inspector poke in every once in a great while and saying, you know, is this kitchen sanitary?"
Gatto says he was shocked by how hard it was to get the act passed. It was amended 35 times. But he says he's heard from hundreds of people - from a cupcake maker in Glendale to a group of jam and jelly producers in Siskiyou County -- eager for it to take effect.
First Language Attrition: Why my parents and I don't speak the same language
UPDATE: James Kim's Off-Ramp piece received a 2013 Mark Twain Award by the Associated Press Television-Radio Association for best light feature. Congratulations, James! -- John Rabe
I have always had a tough time understanding my parents. Not because we’re from different generations, or born and raised in different countries; it’s that we don’t speak the same language. Growing up, I remembered that my Korean was actually pretty good. My mom said that I “spoke Korean very well for seven years.” But afterwards, I “stopped speaking Korean and only spoke English.”
This has made my relationship with my parents difficult to cultivate. We always are easily irritated with each other because we constantly misunderstand what each of us is saying. We can hardly explain a movie’s plot line to one another, let alone express what we’re going through. The only time I talk with my parents is when I’m asking them “what’s for dinner?” I wanted to try and fix this problem by taking the first initial step; that is to figure out if my condition is common or not.
I talked to Linda Light, a Linguistics professor at Cal State Long Beach, who assured me that I wasn’t a screw up and that the condition is called First Language Attrition. Light says “there’s a tendency across all minority groups of a three-generation thing.” The first generation of immigrants speaks their native language; the second generation tends to be bilingual, while the third generation loses the native language. “But Koreans especially often lose it in the second generation, not the third.” It was a relief to find out that my ineptness towards speaking Korean was actually common in my immigrant generation. Yet, I still couldn’t help but feel guilty for not being able to communicate with my parents.
I decided that the only thing to do was to take initiative and have a one-on-one personal conversation with my parents. Of course, I brought my friend along to help translate the conversation. Going into the interview, I thought that the only thing I had to improve was my Korean language. After doing that, all our problems would be fixed. Wrong. My Dad believes that my “apathy towards Korean culture” is what caused our relationship to tear apart. My mom replied that not only should I express myself to them, but I also need to listen to how they used to live in Korea to understand them better.
My lack of Korean language wasn’t the problem; it was my attitude towards Korean culture. This whole time I thought the solution was as simple as taking some courses at a Korean language school. Instead, I learned that my whole demeanor towards my native culture needs a revision.
Cypress Park evangelist William Matelyan hit by car, killed
UPDATE: We recently learned that William Matelyan died in July after being hit by a car on North Figueroa Street in Cypress Park; he was 84. LA DOT was planning to improve pedestrian and bike safety on that stretch of road, before the project was stopped by LA City Councilman Gil Cedillo.
Matelyan tragically died at 12:30pm on July 22, 2014, after complications resulting from being hit by an automobile earlier that morning. Matelyan had just gotten off the phone with local pastor Jesse Rosas prior to his accident. ... Rosas estimated during his podium time speech at the (memorial) service that Matelyan had crossed Figueroa for his morning ritual of coffee at the Yum Yum Donuts near Avenue 26 when he was accidentally hit. -- LA1 News
Here's Jerry Gorin's piece on Matelyan from September, 2012:
There are always three cars parked at the intersection of Cypress Avenue and Figueroa, along with a companion RV parked at the Union 3 auto body shop on the corner. Each vehicle is covered bumper to bumper in bible verse and posters of lions and eagles. There are American and Israeli flags waving over the windows, and newspaper clippings from the Vatican. "Repent," appears over and over, "for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." This is the home and headquarters of William Matelyan, a spirited Korean War veteran who's on a crusade to save mankind.
Matelyan was born Jewish. His parents were Austrian immigrants who changed their names and fled Nazi Europe. They settled in Philadelphia, re-opened their old tailoring business, and tried to ignore their Jewish background.
"My parents told me, ‘Don't tell anyone you're a Jew’," says Matelyan. "And soon I said, ‘Why? I'm a man, and a Jew. What's the difference?’"
When asked if he considers himself Jewish now, Matelyan answers, "Yeah, in fact a completed Jew. A messianic Jew.
"I was (once) a wicked person. I went to Korea, to fight in the Korean War. I was drinking at that time. I had Canadian Club; I took about one third, and I hit the ground and started to vomit. I heard a voice say, ‘You're going to go to war’. I said, ‘I'm in one.’ And God says, ‘This is for the truth. You're going to work for me. You're going to take my word out there and get killed, the same as you do for America.' Matelyan then sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic as he relishes the memory.
After the war Matelyan started looking for work as a house painter, and he and his wife and children moved to LA, where there was painting work year-round. He would end up working for 35 years as the Painting Supervisor at East LA College, where he also gave informal music lessons to students. When he retired he could no longer afford his rent, so he moved out.
"I lived in Elysian Valley," he says, "and I finally moved out of a rented house into an RV. I was parking the RV on the street, and the city was going to penalize me, either by putting me in jail or a $1000 fine. They didn't carry the threat out, but I didn't let them. I went over and told Carlos, and he said he had a spot for me. So he let me come and park here."
About three years ago, Carlos Cruz, the owner of Union 3 auto body shop, let Matelyan move his RV onto his lot permanently, and that's where it stands today. Cruz and his workers makes a big racket everyday, just 20 feet from the RV, but Matelyan doesn’t let it bother him. He's made it as cozy as possible.
"We got Gardenias, Chile plants, tomatoes – an apricot tree from a seed. This is like the Garden of Eden. And the word of God is out here for everyone to see. It's free!"
On the other side of the RV, his messianic clunkers are parked right on Figueroa Street.
"I move them around, I keep them here. It's a moving, preaching, word of God. I park at IHOP and hand out gospel tracks, because that's the menu."
Matelyan tries to spread the word as much as he can, but lately he's been disappointed with his audience. He blames poor political leadership, and Americans' ongoing obsession with money.
Still, he believes that when the time comes and the pressure builds, most people will repent.