The morons in the Miami government want to be able to regulate people who are voluntarily feeding the homeless. Of course, it's all done under the guise of "protecting" the homeless from someone inadvertently (or perhaps purposely) giving them tainted food. By the way, the local homeless shelters are backing the ordinance also:

"We are not sure how that food is being prepared. How long has it been out? Certainly from our perspective, we want to make sure that the folks that we are helping, and I think the community at large would agree with this, is it's done at the best level possible," said Sam Gill with the Camillus House.

Do you see how even charities will use the guns of gunvernment to block competition? I could understand there being concern if there was a rash of intentional (or even unintentional) poisonings by these Good Samaritans, but this is not the case. It's just one more way for the Establishment to butt into the private, voluntary actions of honorable people. In this instance, my guess is it's more about control than raising revenue through licensing fees.

[Thanks to Travis Holte]

UPDATE: Yahya Mohammed writes:

You're absolutely right, this is completely ridiculous.  I'm actually a part of Project Downtown, an organization at the University of Miami, and we feed the homeless every Friday in the downtown part of the city.  We often have families who cook and bring out food, and now they will have to buy a permit and go through all kinds of ridiculous training, even though I'm sure their kitchens are cleaner than any restaurant.

And Bert Bobbitt relates his own horror tale of feeding the homeless harassment:

I used to be involved with a group called Food Not Bombs, and we would feed the homeless in the downtown area of Norfolk, Virginia every Sunday around 6-7 PM.  About 2-3 years ago we started having the cops showing up at the shelter we were feeding at.  Apparently, the steak restaurant didn't like us in the one way road feeding the homeless (the shelter and restaurant were beside each other).

After enough trouble and being told to leave by the restaurant owners AND the shelter, the city started getting involved and one day a health inspector showed up to see if everything was "safe."  We cooked all the food ourselves at a church that let us use their kitchen; we filled containers (and clean plastic buckets) to hold the food and served plates with plastic forks to the homeless.  The health inspector could not find any fault in the food (everything was fresh and the correct temperature).  Eventually, they said everyone serving needed to be licensed and would wear plastic gloves, and we would also need to be "adopted" by a legal business or group—I'm assuming so we would be "legitimate."

We were not harming anyone.  We went to the shelter and provided better food than they could.  What's sad is some of the homeless preferred to stay on the streets, because the conditions of the shelter were just as deplorable.  One of the members asked one of the city officials what the difference is in us feeding them out of a truck and in a building; if I remember correctly it was along the lines of "if you invited them into your home, that would be different."  I'm not that sure how it would be different.  There are people on the streets eating out of trashcans, and when people decide to serve them healthy food (Food Not Bombs is a vegan/vegetarian based group) the city attacks them for it as if they're criminals.  Yet, I don't see the city doing anything to improve the conditions in the city.

The Norfolk chapter of Food Not Bombs still serves, but the last few times I went (over a year ago) we had to serve food that was already prepackaged and we had to be discrete about our actions, in case the cops were suddenly called upon us.  Every Sunday before the city practically banned us from feeding people, we'd serve around 60 to 70 people on average, maybe even 80.  It seemed the numbers dropped down to around 30 (at the most) after the city started dictating what hungry people can consume.