Some zoning laws also have safety implications. If dine-sharing apps take off, I expect the trajectory to quickly go from “sharing a meal with a neighbour” to “

Some zoning laws also have safety implications. If dine-sharing apps take off, I expect the trajectory to quickly go from “sharing a meal with a neighbour” to “running a full-time restaurant out of your house.” Both Uber and AirBnB have followed this arc. Uber even gives preference to drivers who work full-time. Zoning is related to building codes. All the rules around waste disposal, fire codes, and so forth are dramatically different between a restaurant and a private home. And the financial incentives with a “dine-sharing” business will be to ignore safety until forced to comply, as they have been historically with almost all businesses. Who is going to check that there are even working smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher? For that matter, who will even check that there is a cooker hood removing grease? We don’t enforce these things for private homes because when you cook for yourself, your family, and people you know, there are social incentives in place to control safety. There’s no such incentive in place when you’re cooking for strangers. And of course, this is a dramatically different story when you compare to ride-sharing. Private cars have the same safety features as the taxis already on the road, and drive on the same roads. Private kitchens do not have the same safety features as restaurant kitchens, and are not housed in the same buildings. Private cars operate in public, with some expectation that the police will intervene if the car appears to be driven improperly, like speeding. Not perfectly, but there is enough oversight to provide incentives to drive safely. There is no such oversight for private kitchens. Ride-sharing apps have a high degree of tracking: They monitor the car’s location and speed continuously. Location is shared with the passenger’s app. Will dining apps monitor the food being cooked? Do they know if the eggs are past their best-before date? Dine-sharing is unlike ride-sharing or home-sharing in a number of substantial ways that are at relevant to zoning and the concept of what is and isn’t a fit establishment for cooking for strangers.