During the 1910 cholera outbreak in Istanbul, fishing activities around Terkos Lake, situated in the northwest of the city, were prohibited as part of measures to curb the spread of the disease. In December 1910, a tax farmer named Mustafa Rıfat submitted a petition to the Contract Office of Istanbul Municipality, outlining how this decision was causing him financial losses. The petition revealed that he had paid 40 thousand gurus to the Ministry of Foundation for the right to fish in a specific region of the lake. Despite the substantial payment for this right, Mustafa Rıfat found himself barred from exercising it during that winter. His experience was not unique; there were comparable instances both preceding and following his case. For instance, during the cholera outbreak in 1893, tax farmer Mehmed Salim submitted a similar petition to the Office of the Grand Vizier. In his plea, he argued that the prohibition on the sale of various food items, such as eggplant, figs, and tomatoes, within the framework of the fight against cholera, was causing financial losses and violating the legal contract he had entered into with the Ottoman state. This presentation, focusing on the summarized petitions and other archival documents, aims to highlight the conflicts and cooperation that occurred at the everyday level among various social actors and the state during the implementation of food control mechanisms in the late Ottoman Empire. Concentrating on the case of tax farmers in the context of cholera-related food regulations, I establish that the cholera pandemic and other threats to public health presented significant "contingencies" during the late 19th century, impacting tax farmers with the uncertainties they brought. Essentially, the Ottoman state externalized the financial risks associated with epidemics and essential sanitation practices to merchants and tax farmers. I demonstrate that while the state embraced the discourse of sanitation and public health for arbitrating a tax-related conflict and used the tax-farming mechanism as a means to expropriate wealth, tax farmers attempted to mitigate the negative impact of these actions by invoking the "moral authority" of the sultan. Examining conflicts between tax farmers and the state through a sanitation lens provides valuable insights into the practical workings of food regulations at the everyday level. By intertwining food with its urban context and embedding it within power relations, this analysis also contributes to the literature on tax farming, urbanization, and critical food studies.