A Pinnacle of Bureaucracy
reconsidering the relevancy of restaurant health inspections
Print“They’re talking about finding a rat under the deep fryers,” says Marcos Belasquez , Pinnacle Gourmet’s new manager. Suddenly agitated, Belasquez shifts forward in his seat, eyeing the slow trickle of customers flowing into his restaurant. “That’s a new deep fryer, we just started using it three or four days ago,” Belasquez says, apparently arguing that no vermin would willfully choose to inhabit such a sparklingly clean apparatus.
On Dec. 22, 2009, Pinnacle received 94 health code violation points, and on Dec. 29, health inspectors found “harborage or conditions conducive to vermin infestation.” Rumor travels fast in Morningside Heights, and news of Pinnacle’s abrupt shutdown by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene seemed common knowledge at the beginning of the spring term. Pinnacle Gourmet, on 115th Street, has long provided drowsy and hungover students with a greasy slice or slightly stale hero. Now, the ongoing Pinnacle-versus-health-department narrative has led many to question the fundamental safety of dining not only at Pinnacle, but also at campus eateries and around the city.
Zoe Tobin, a spokeswoman for the New York City Health Department, said in an e-mail statement that “as a result of the 12/29/09 inspection, the Health Department closed Pinnacle pending correction of their violations. The violations found included evidence of mice in food and non-food areas, lack of a Food Protection Certificate and conditions conducive to vermin. Pinnacle passed a pre-operational re-opening inspection on 1/13/09 and was authorized to re-open.” Belasquez has only worked at Pinnacle for two weeks, yet he has already begun taking steps to rectify these problems, including “keeping fresh salad separate from dairy products” and stricter use of hairnets. Targeted efforts to address vermin seem conspicuously absent from Belasquez’s plan of action, other than his irritation at the grossly inaccurate rat gossip. A new deep fryer might produce crispier fries, but treating the machine like an apotropaic symbol seems foolhardy.
Of course, dining out in any city involves a certain trust on the part of the customer, a sense that restaurants take every possible precaution to ensure diner safety. Newcomers to the New York City dining scene develop realistic expectations for restaurant hygiene—they learn quickly that large cities have many inhabitants, some of them vermin. Instead of immaculateness, the standard shifts to simple cleanliness—a bar rarely reached in private kitchens. In professional kitchens this measure seems even more difficult to meet due to the sheer volume of food and the number of employees. This appears nowhere more evident than in the immense Columbia Dining Services network.
In order to respond to health code stipulations, Dining Services employs a thorough internal inspection procedure, attempting to keep students safe from food-borne illness. “On a weekly basis all the managers visit all the other locations and what is done is what is called a 24-point audit,” Victoria Dunn, director of Dining Services, says. “Basically you go through the whole serving area, you look at things like light bulbs, the Board of Health will look for holes, so that’s conducted by my team once, sometimes twice a week. In addition, there are certain things that we follow from the Board of Health inspection as well as HACCP [Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point]. Temperatures are taken at every station every hour.” Moreover, Dunn says that all of her cooks obtain a food handler certificate. Upon first appraisal, students should have less to fear from John Jay than from phantom rats migrating across the street from Pinnacle.
But a cursory examination of the health department’s website reveals that John Jay’s last inspection lead to less than auspicious results. Passing with 18 points, John Jay still faced five violations on July 28, the last available data. The violations form a shocking list: “Facility not vermin proof. Harborage or conditions conducive to vermin exist. Food contact surface not properly washed rinsed, and sanitized after each use and following any activity when contamination may have occurred. Evidence of flying insects or live flying insects present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas. Evidence of roaches or live roaches present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas. Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas.” In the months since the July 28 inspection, perhaps Columbia Dining Services has radically altered safety procedures. Still, a piece of ziti pizza at Pinnacle looks like an autoclaved, pasteurized, surgically sanitized, and hermetically sealed dish in comparison.
With such a nausea-inducing list of violations, assuming that food poisoning strikes frequently on campus seems plausible. Nevertheless, “we haven’t had any food-borne illness in 10 years,” Scott Wright, vice president of Student Auxiliary and Business Services, says. Thus, a contradiction emerges between signals from city bureaucracy and campus bureaucracy, a dissonance that indicts either the health inspection system or Columbia’s response. Wright explains that “where we have seen bad inspection results has tended to be more when there is a new inspector and that new inspector will come into a pre-existing condition, and I’m going to give you a real example of this, and treat it differently from the predecessor.”
Wright’s example reads like a poorly wrought absurdist play, satirizing the health inspection system to the point of farce. “We have a location that had a dishwasher that didn’t work. So we didn’t use it. It was adjacent to another kitchen. No big deal, we took the serving spoons, took them over to the kitchen, ran them through their dish machine, brought them back for service. That is a perfectly acceptable standard by the health department,” Wright says. “New health inspector came in and said dishwasher not working, no ware washing on site, 30-point violation. That is an automatic failure.”
In response, Dining Services installed a new dishwasher, “and ultimately that goes into what the cost of the food is,” Wright says. “We got written up one time for a little bit of lint on a light bulb cover in a freezer, and that cost $700 and that goes into the cost.” Along with protecting students from lint, health care inspections apparently drive up the cost of meal plans as well.
In fact, the entire health inspection infrastructure operates as a revenue-generation tool, altering the mechanisms intended to secure customers from dangerous foodstuffs. Wright observes that “when city funding changed and the health department, much like the parking enforcement guys, had to become partially self-funded by the fines they issued, there was a one-to-one correlation between the number and amount of the fines we received from prior to that budgetary decision.” Fines, in other words, fund the department.
Indeed, money or the lack thereof, fuels both the health inspection and Columbia Dining Services machines. The biggest impacts of health inspections for students may not lie in physical health at all. Rather, continually escalating food prices at restaurants across Manhattan, in Morningside Heights, and at campus eateries constitute the most immediate effects of a fundamentally broken bureaucratic organization. Students feel the subsequent results where it hurts: not their stomachs, but their pocketbooks.
Why, then, do consumers continue to put stock in the health inspection system? Paranoia and an illusion of control bolster this convoluted scheme. First, the health inspection organization itself produces irrational fear among city dwellers, associating poor inspection results with outbreaks of typically unpleasant, albeit nonfatal, diseases. A current proposal from the Board of Health would “publicly grade New York City restaurants on their sanitary conditions ... Each establishment would have to post its most recent grade in full view of potential customers.” Certainly a valiant notion, this categorization proposal would work well if health inspections primarily measured criteria relevant to public safety. Yet the Board of Health takes off points for even minor infractions. Inevitably, forcing restaurants to display A, B, or C grades would lead to the expansion of an already extant, widespread, government-mediated paranoia that rests not in reality, but in bureaucratic propaganda and the mass media response. Second, the concept of restaurant inspections satisfies a deeply rooted need in the human mind to account for situations beyond individual control, to harness risks and master them through external instruments. Unfortunately, the health inspection system’s efficacy as a risk control tool breaks down when tested against recent incidents of food-borne illness. Witness, for example, the norovirus outbreak at the New York Times cafeteria, a situation that involved the health department reacting to the crisis, but not preventing the emergency. Only after employees began displaying gastrointestinal symptoms did the health department descend, demonstrating that sanitation problems occur even following inspections. Food poisoning always remains a possibility wherever food preparation happens, and no amount of outside intervention completely eliminates the risk.
Food vendors take failing grades seriously. In the case of Pinnacle, “when you get 93 points, you’re not waiting six months for your next inspection,” Wright says. “It’s a lot of money, and that person’s probably going to have to run a cleaner shop or they’re going to get shut down.” For now, Pinnacle probably remains a relatively safe dining option around campus, serving up reliable, if not four-star quality, food late into the night. But no neighborhood restaurant or cafeteria can absolutely guarantee that it will always pass every inspection.
The incident, however, may well serve as a warning to take care when cooking at home: watch out for lint on light bulbs and rats scurrying under barely functioning dorm room ranges. At least students need never fear the scrutinizing eye of a health inspector, ready to levy another needless fine if one cutting board looks out of place.
4 February 2010
vol. 8, issue 2
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