Dan Walters: California Legislature serves up some goofiness

One of the more common complaints one hears about the California Legislature is that it operates in a reality vacuum – making its decrees in ignorance of real-world impacts or even how the real world works.

It's debatable whether the criticism is generally accurate, but if one were to make a case for it, Senate Bill 1443 would be a strong piece of evidence.

Sen. Jenny Oropeza, D-Long Beach, is the bill's author, and her motivation appears to be benign, even laudable – putting less food in the garbage and more in the stomachs of poor people.

Specifically, her measure would require a "retail food facility" – a caterer, in other words – to give its clients, as part of their service contracts, the option of giving "any leftover food" to nonprofit food banks or claiming it for themselves.

When Oropeza presented the measure to the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day, she lamented that so much edible food winds up in the dump rather than being used to alleviate human hunger and said she wanted to do something about it.

What could be wrong with that? Well, as a former president once said about the word "is," it largely depends on the definition of "any leftover food."

Several caterers attempted to point out to the committee that their business operations don't, for the most part, include the concept of leftover food. They contract to provide guests at an event – a wedding, an anniversary party, a retirement party or, it should be noted, a political fundraiser – with a certain level of food service, generally on a per-plate price basis, and prepare enough food, either on site or readily available, to ensure that every guest is served the agreed-upon menu.

Calculating the amount of food that may be necessary for a specific event is an inexact business. So, the caterers continued, it may mean that more food than theoretically necessary is actually available – an extra slab of prime rib, for example. But the contract doesn't specify an amount of food, just that every guest will be served. Therefore, caterers argued, so-called leftovers belong to them and can be either recycled for other events, voluntarily donated to charity if edible or discarded if not fit for consumption.

That's the way the catering business generally operates – which politicians, who both sponsor and attend many catered events, should have known.

And were Oropeza's bill to become law, every contract for catering would have to include some agreement on what constitutes leftovers, which could lead to caterers reducing the amounts of food they have available and perhaps leaving some late-arriving guests without nourishment.

Oropeza airily dismissed the caterers' complaints. "There's no question that this law would require a change in behavior by caterers," she said. "It would require better planning and less waste."

But Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, the committee's chairwoman, admitted she had "learned a lot today" about how the catering business works and suggested delaying action on the bill in hopes that Oropeza's differences with the caterers could be worked out.

Why is the Legislature nibbling on the caterers' business? Oropeza's measure, in effect, would expropriate the private property of mostly small and often struggling businesspeople to serve some vague social purpose, forcing them to either reduce the amounts of food they have available to their clients or raise their prices to cover "any leftover food" that their clients might claim for themselves or their favored charities – assuming, of course, that a workable definition of the term could be drafted.

This may not be the dumbest bill to surface in the Capitol, but it's right up there – and a case in point of how the building's occupants live in a strange little world of their own.

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• Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.