“The number and variety of fruits and vegetables used in pickle making is almost endless,” wrote the Texas Department of Agriculture in a 1917 bulletin, “cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and green or unripe fruits being most common.”

Today, though, Texas officials seem to have had a change of heart, barring the McHaneys from selling the produce they grow and pickle. So why not cucumbers? It’s not that the McHaneys have anything against cucumbers—it’s just that that particular vegetable doesn’t grow as well where they live.

“There’s always produce you can’t sell fresh at market, so we were looking at how we could use some of that produce to make a value-added product,” Anita tells me, through her lawyers. “We had a number of vegetables that would have done well as a pickled vegetable, but the most obvious was beets; we grew wonderful beets.”

“We don’t do very well with cucumbers on our place,” Jim adds, also via the couple’s attorneys. “You know, different crops have different homes.”

The suit stems not from some pedantic or semantic battle but, rather, from the health department’s curiously restrictive interpretation of a law intended to benefit small food producers like the McHaneys. Commonly dubbed the Texas Homemade Food Bill, that law established a framework for regulating cottage food producers and their food products in the state.