• Michael Gebert
  • Scott Buer at Bolzano Artisan Meats in 2010

A Chicagoan wandering the Dane County Farmers’ Market, the vast farmers’ market that wraps around all four sides of the state capitol in Madison on Wednesdays and Saturdays, could be forgiven for thinking that if there’s an artisanal food paradise, its name is Wisconsin. The creativity of everything from cheese makers to beekeepers to buffalo-jerky curers seems boundless. But two stories in the past few months of creative, artisanal businesses being forced out of business politically suggest trouble in foodie paradise. This isn’t so much about the recent election in Wisconsin, which drew headlines and political fault lines with fairly clearcut sides. It’s more about the way the power of government in general can be used, in election season and out, to achieve ends that benefit one side, or the bureaucrats themselves—and the cost is a business environment that prevents innovation and stifles socially beneficial efforts to improve our food system.

The Buers set up in an old dairy in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood which had been repurposed as a food business incubator, and their plant was considered a model operation—”Our inspectors said the other inspectors were jealous of the ones who got to come to our plant, because it was so advanced. We had an inspector come in on her own time, unpaid, just to educate herself more about what we were doing and what kind of cool things could be going on at the state level.”

The result was that the state went after Bolzano for selling meat products with the Cooperative Interstate program labeling when, they claimed, Bolzano wasn’t actually in the program yet. “The state said we had to recall our products with the Cooperative Interstate label,” Buer explains, “We did that. And then they said that the products we were making, that never were even packaged yet, were also possibly unsafe, for reasons that didn’t make any sense. So then we had to fight to get those released, too. It was a throw everything at us one type of deal. One was that we weren’t really part of this program, apparently, and two was that they didn’t know about our process, somehow, which they did.”

  • Michael Gebert
  • The last batch of Pig Red, made with heritage Red Wattle pork

In the end, Buer and his wife decided to get out of making salumi for retail sale, “keeping our mission going with classes and events instead,” Buer says. They have shut their plant down; their products no longer appear at Eataly or anywhere else. They held a closeout sale for customers, and then the rest of their stock was bought out by another, seemingly more stable artisanal food business, Black Earth Meats near Madison.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that the Buers were pursuing federal USDA certification, but that is no longer the case.