State law too late for this home cook
For more than two years, Josephine paid the rent on Renée McGhee’s one-bedroom apartment in Berkeley. No, Josephine isn’t a person. Josephine was an online marketplace that let home cooks like McGhee sell meals to nearby customers who paid around $12 per serving and picked up the food at the seller’s place.
The Oakland-based startup shut down in February because of pressure from health regulators. It’s illegal for home cooks to sell food made in their kitchens. But not for long.
When Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB626 into law on Sept. 18, California became the first state to legalize the sale of home-cooked meals. It goes into effect Jan. 1, and then cooks like McGhee can legally sell food they’ve cooked in their homes to the public.
But McGhee, who has been a substitute teacher and part-time nanny since she stopped selling food through Josephine, needs the money now.
She’s $370 short of this month’s rent payment.
“There’s no consistency in (substitute teaching and nannying), and today is October 1st, and ask
me do I have my rent,” McGhee, 62, said as we sat in her living room Monday afternoon. “No, I don’t.” McGhee, the former manager of Nothing Bundt Cakes, an Emeryville bakery, said she averaged about $780 a month serving meals through Josephine, which was enough to cover the $750 in rent she pays for the apartment on Alcatraz Avenue that she’s lived in for eight years.
And she usually cooked only one day a week — on Thursdays.
She’d begin mixing ingredients on her stainless steel worktable at around 2 p.m. Popular dishes included lasagna and a pulled pork bowl. McGhee always offered desserts, like sweet potato pie, bread pudding and zucchini citrus bread.
People picked up their food between 5 and 7 p.m., but many decided to eat at one of the five tables McGhee had on her patio that, with the potted plants, picket fence and mosaic round table, feels like a neighborhood cafe.
“People would stay and they would hang out,” she said. “It was fun. It was like family. You got regulars who just looked forward to coming. It was the coolest time.”
Picking up a hot, home-cooked meal and meeting people — sometimes your neighbors for the first time — was what Josephine was all about. It was a way for strangers to bond over food, something we don’t typically do at restaurants, especially if our eyes are more focused on our phones than the food or people in front of us.
Josephine also provided women and people of color an opportunity to create a source of income from something they’d be doing anyway: cooking for family and friends. In this regard, Josephine operated more like a labor justice startup than a tech company.
“They built unity in the community,” said McGhee, who says she gets emails from people asking her to start selling meals again. “They made our art, our skill available for people. It was a wonderful platform.”
Yes, it was. I ate several Josephine meals, which were perfect for someone like me who wanted fresh, delicious meals that were affordable.
Josephine doesn’t plan to start operating again, which makes the bill signing bittersweet.
Matt Jorgensen, a Josephine co-founder, led the effort to reform state law through his work with the COOK Alliance, a nonprofit coalition that sponsored the bill and organized petitions and support rallies.
“It achieves, in a lot of ways, the truest and most powerful vision of what we all came together around Josephine to do in the first place,” Jorgensen said of the bill. “We were trying to help people formalize and get visibility for work that had historically been informal and in the shadows.”
Charley Wang, Josephine’s CEO who co-founded the company in late 2014 with Tal Safran, naming it after a friend’s mother who nurtured them when they moved to the West Coast, said the bill is like an antigentrification measure.
“It’s a way for longtime residents in gentrifying neighborhoods who are struggling to stay there ... to make money,” he said.
McGhee was born and raised in Emeryville, and she told me she grew up in a duplex owned by her grandmother, the only black homeowner on the block.
In January, McGhee, who has three children and 10 grandchildren, said two inspectors came to her apartment and told her she’d face fines if she continued selling meals.
“I felt like a criminal,” she said. “I’m serving the needs of people, and being able to take care of my own financial needs, but I’m a criminal? That’s what it felt like.”
Under the new bill, cooks will need to obtain a permit, as well as the same food managers’ certification as restaurant professionals do. Jorgensen estimates the permitting process will cost cooks around $500 to $1,000.
Cooks must also agree to an inspection of their kitchens and, like restaurants, their kitchens are subject to unscheduled drop-ins from inspectors. And if they gross more than $50,000 a year, cooks will have to move to a commercial kitchen.
But it will be hard for cooks like McGhee to replace the marketplace Josephine built.
“When I started Josephine, it was like somebody gave me a mixing bowl with every ingredient for a successful food business,” she said. “And all I had to do was work it.”