Food safety and public health

Recently, this newspaper witnessed, first hand, shocking evidence of a flagrant violation of food safety standards at a snackette run by a prominent city department store. The City Council’s Food Hygiene Department has said that they found no evidence of the particular violation that we saw; but we know what we saw and we had more than ample time to understand what we were looking at.

The Food Hygiene Department, however,   found evidence of other food safety infractions.  The establishment has been cited for those violations and is required to remedy them within a particular time frame.

Beyond that particular incident, however, we learnt   during our interaction with officials of the Food Hygiene Department that the public may be at much greater risk from compromises in food safety standards among eating houses than we think.

There are, according, to the Head of the Department, around 236 eating houses in the city which fall under the purview of the City Council. That number does not include the scores of roadside ‘setups’ and assorted ‘lunch ladies’ who ply their trade on the streets and outside schools.

The Food Hygiene Department has five officers, and inspecting and monitoring standards among food vendors, restaurants and snackettes is one of their several responsibilities. Simply put, the Food Safety Department does not have anywhere near enough capacity to assure us that many violations, including serious ones, are not going undetected.

It is true that in a country where we continue to talk glibly about our tourism potential   owners and their employees really ought to practice some measure of self-regulation. If the truth be told, however, there are far too many ‘entrepreneurs’ who really couldn’t care less about food safety standards, nor do they really expect their employees to care.  Numbered among these are some of the roadside food vendors whose primary preoccupation is clearly not with food hygiene but rather with catching their hand.

Food safety is not one of those issues that regularly attract serious official attention or robust public debate; indeed, many perhaps most of those food safety violations that come to public attention have their origins in customer complaints rather than in discovery by the responsible agency. Arising out of the frustration expressed by the Food Hygiene Department officials with whom we spoke, we detect a quiet resignation, a feeling that their failure to persuade their bosses to allocate more resources to the Food Hygiene Department is a reflection of a chronic societal indifference to some things that really matter.

You would think, for example, that the various private sector bodies whose members are part of the food service industry would at least take a public position from time to time on an issue as important as this. Advocacy of self-regulation might at least cause some of the offenders to think that they are in danger of being exposed and perhaps even isolated. The private sector bodies, unfortunately, remain mostly silent, mindful of the likelihood of giving offence.

And if the views that we have expressed are felt, somehow, to be directed at the food vendors who ply the streets, we hasten to assure that this in not the case. Food vending is one of those businesses that has mushroomed in response to rising unemployment in the city (and, we suspect, elsewhere in the country)  and while any legitimate business enterprise is to be applauded we must guard against a line of reasoning that simply says people got to make a living,   since in the particular case of the food service industry we would in effect be saying that there is really nothing wrong with some people making a living at the expense of the health of others.