Dear Mr. Frieden,As author of the well-punctuated “Don’t Junk That Buckboard!” and the beautifully typed “1,001 Things to Do With A Betamax,” I feel obliged to offer my services to members of your department, and possibly you as well. Who but the self-publisher of “New Opportunities for the Stagecoach Mechanic” would fully understand the unpleasant career prospects facing your restaurant sanitation inspectors? All things must come to an end, and recent developments in New York suggest the final chapter is already written for the one-time knights of public health and eatery safety. There and elsewhere, the clipboard-toting, infraction-hunting department policeman has followed the Humphrey Bogart-style gumshoe into antiquity. Like it or not, the restaurant health inspector is passé.
The proof? It may take a village to raise a child, but all you need are two dozen rats frolicking inside a Taco Bell-KFC unit to convince the village its food safety watchdogs aren’t doing their jobs. By now even astronauts aboard the space station have seen the
Worst of all, those videos will be on the Internet for eons to come, constantly reminding consumers of how restaurant conditions can go awry. As instillers of confidence in the dining public, your inspectors rank right up there with E. coli and salmonella.
Restaurateurs in New York say the incident has jolted your department out of its somnambulism—or, in the case of an inspector caught on video by a restaurant’s security camera, outright slumber. He was right there on tape, nodding off.
But other members of the squad, operators gripe, are coming down on them like Eliot Ness, closing places for slim cause to prove no rat will make monkeys out of them. As long as there’s a swab to take or a thermometer to read, rodents will never be able to rest easy with this department on the prowl.
Then again, neither would the proprietors or staffers whose restaurants have been closed for business.
You’ve been quick to reassure the public your inspectors were merely doing their usual hard-nosed job. But even if you crossed your heart and swore on the Yankees’ chances for a pennant, lots of people were going to smell a rat. That undeniable lapse at the Taco Bell-KFC outlet has undermined confidence in the inspection process, the way finding someone else in bed with the spouse tends to put a considerable strain on trust. You failed the public, and the public isn’t going to forget it. You’d be better off working collaboratively with restaurants to guarantee they’re safe, instead of triggering accusations that your inspectors now disregard safety levels to bash places unduly.
If it’s any consolation, New York’s restaurant fanatics aren’t alone in having their faith shaken. Last year, residents of Chicago learned their city had just 46 inspectors to monitor the food safety of its 15,500 food outlets. That works out to 337 places for each field officer, which means each had to visit more than one establishment every working day to check the whole batch in the course of a year. The problem: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that a restaurant be inspected at least four times a year. That translated into stop-bys at five places every eight-hour shift. At that rate, most people wouldn’t notice a rat unless it opened the door for them.
The same week, Philadelphia officials disclosed that the City of Brotherly Love had a mere 32 inspectors to monitor 15,000 restaurants.
In fairness, you can’t blame the health departments of those cities if they lack the resources to get the job done. Chicago, for instance, had 150 inspectors in 1982, when it presumably had far fewer restaurants.
Restaurants often bemoan how little training inspectors appear to have been given and how frequently an undertrained rookie replaces the one who’d been there just one inspection earlier. The turnover, they contend, rivals the churn of a fast-food staff, and that means each fresh face is still on a steep learning curve. No wonder many operators say their self-regulatory efforts, either applied by a parent company or administered through a third-party verification service, are often more stringent than what the government imposes.
And then there’s the very nature of the inspection process. It often has all the supportive, collaborative feel of a traffic stop. They’re checking up on you, and you’re under a scrutiny that could be ego-bruising, costly or downright devastating to a place’s reputation. It’s doubtful that Hallmark has a card for the moment.
Tragically, the shortcomings of the present-day inspection system are coming into focus as the public’s need for reassurance is by all accounts galloping faster than one of New York’s now-famous rodents. After three major E. coli outbreaks, four high-profile norovirus contaminations and the ongoing rat scandal in New York—all in the space of a few brief months—fears have to be quelled or the whole industry could suffer. The trade, and local governments, can’t wait for the role and skills of restaurant health inspectors to evolve into something more effective and confidence-inspiring. Concerted action has to be taken, with job requirements and training standardized, technology embraced and accountability enhanced. The job has to be actively recast, and quickly.
Which is why, Mr. Frieden, you may be interested in my current literary endeavor, “What Color Is Your Lab Coat?”