Curmudgeon's Cookery - Food Law and Regulation

"Do you suppose the men who are adulterating food, and corrupting the staff of life, do not know they are spreading sorrow and trouble and mischief? They know it perfectly well; but they do not care. 
They are making money, and that is the main thing to their thought. All human comfort, and life itself, put into one scale, with money in the other, do not weigh a particle as far as they are concerned." Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

"The rule is well established in American law that a vendor of food warrants that it is fit for human consumption, and is liable for damages if the food causes physical injury to a customer." J. A. Tobey, Public Health Law, l947

"Nothing is so minor that some damned bureaucrat somewhere will not write some dumb law about it. The dumpsters of history are filled with the smelly discards of asinine regulations." Curmudgeon Quote September 1, 2000

Virgins Fail the Food Test! In Imperial Rome, roast suckling pigs were so popular a treat that they became scarce. To remedy this, laws were passed that forbid the slaughter of virgin swine. Current day food inspectors might ponder this question, how does one check out the virginity of a pig?? During this same era there were equally dumb sumptuary laws regarding sex and conspicuously extravagant food consumption. 

Roman Regulation. Possibly the first food inspectors were City of Rome officials at the port of Ostia. Grain coming in on ships was unloaded and inspected for both quality and quantity. A sample from the shipment was placed into a sealed bag and held as insurance against adulteration or fraud. This kept everyone honest!

Seat of Pants Inspection. Curmudgeon recalls many a food inspector associate who, by either drinking habits or an inclination to sit down a lot of the time, would be an ideal candidate for Tavern Inspector. August Claive in his book Pure Food and Drugs in California describes this job:
"In the sixteenth century many towns employed ale tasters whose duty was to inspect beer and ale. The methods of testing were at times curious … beverages were not only tasted, but were spilled on wooden seats. The tester, attired in leather breeches, then sat on the wet portion. If sugar had been added, the tester became stuck so fast that rising was difficult." 
I'm sure this caused some problems. Imagine the Tavern Inspector staggering home with smelly, sticky pants, and the wife asking: "Well, were you just drinking again today, you sorry-ass slob, or working?"

Brevity is Beautiful! The first pure food law in California was signed by Governor Peter Burnett on April 16, l850. It is one (1) sentence:

"If any person or persons shall knowingly sell any flesh of any diseased animal or otherwise unwholesome provisions, or any adulterated provisions or drink or liquors, every person offending shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars, or imprisoned in the county jail not more than six months."

Compare this model of succinctness to what is around 150 years later. The FDA 1997 Food Code is approximately 450 pages! This, in turn, is almost ten times the size of the 1976 Ordinance which was born as a short mimeographed document in 1935. 
The new Code is more science based and provides important emphasis on food temperature control and food-bug disease transmission. However, many restaurant managers and food inspectors are intimidated by the length, complexity, and cost of this bureaucratic buffet. 
Is there something  like Moore's Law (computer chip capacity will double about every 18 months) that works in the regulation area, be it the food code or the tax code?

One Lump or Two. During WWI to conserve short supplies, certain wheat flour items were not to be served in public dining rooms on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sugar supplies were also controlled. However, if you treated your waiter nice, you might get an extra lump sneaked out of a coat jacket pocket.

Flour Inspections Support Hospital. In 1853California funded eight Flour Inspectors to certify that this food staple was not adulterated. At the time Los Angeles was so unimportant that it did not warrant an inspector. An interesting part of the law regarded the use of fines. The person informing on the fraud would get half of the fine and the rest would go to the State Hospital Fund.

Tall Pole Inspection. In Old Venice, guild standards required that all fish be taken to the "tall pole" in the market place. There, they were examined, valued, and duty paid. The fishmonger stalls were inspected daily so that old fish would be removed and destroyed. It was not permitted to "freshen up" fish by sprinkling water on stock, but there were ways that the "fish fags," as the fish sellers were called then, were able to circumvent the restrictions. Is this where the saying "Run it up the pole" came from? During the Middle Ages in Switzerland, old fish had to be identified as inferior food and sold only to strangers.

Curmudgeon's Uglies.

Incubator Reject Eggs. In the egg incubation and hatching business, there is always a portion of eggs that are infertile. Operators wanting to make an extra buck would select out these eggs to sell to bakeries. There would be chick embryos present in some eggs, even, on occasion, a live baby chick breaking out of the discarded egg! It was all mixed together, the bigger pieces strained out, diluted and baked. Yummy!

Dead Drinks, Dead Geckos. Some readers setting in a bar on a slow night may have noticed the bar tender swishing the empty glasses in little compartment sinks, wondering how effective was this cleaning or wondering about the hygiene of an open ice dispensing bin that had all kinds of hoses or bottles stuck in it. Bartenders have been observed to get rid of the ice in old ("dead") drinks by dumping in the same bin used to dispense "new" ice (but they will carefully swish the glasses to clean them).
What some food inspectors find titillating would be in the ice bin the next morning (after it has been "cleaned" with a bucket of hot water dumped in before locking up the night before):  bottle caps, string, pink slime gunk, paper pieces, green slime gunk, cigarette butts, cigar butts, roaches, flies, broken glass, and condoms.

Curmudgeon recalls a plugged up ice bin in a Hawaiian "noodle bar." Floating on top among a few left over ice cubes and quite a few dead roaches was a gecko lizard, legs straight out, with a real sorry look on his face. We speculated that he was chasing his dinner, and by unfortunate accident, slipped and fell into the open bin.
We called the owner over. He took a look and then shrugged if off, "So what." It was pointed out that if food laws didn't apply, then the local humane society might take an interest regarding this cruelty (drowning roaches and lizards in ice water!).

Before we leave this topic, one of the popular bar checks is to "candle" (hold the bottle in front of a light) some of the expensive liquors that have an open pour spout. It seems that these sweet items attract fruit flies and are often found contaminated by health department inspectors.

The Taste of Rat. At one time food inspectors would go unannounced to milk and cream receiving stations and conduct milk sediment and taste inspections. Product quality was often bad at a "B" grade station, where the farmer's cans arrived warm from a long journey. The inspector would use a sediment pump to suck up a small portion from the bottom of the can and press it through a filter paper. All kinds of crap (including the cow manure kind) would be exposed, featuring dead flies, pus from mastitis infected cows, cockle burs, and straw. These filter pads were then mounted onto cardboard and dried as "evidence" against the dairy. 
There were brave "certified" tasters that Curmudgeon recalls holding in awe. They would check cream for off-odors, such as wild onions, or even, the taste of a dead rat. Sometimes rats would be drink out of the open milk container in the farmer's barn, fall in, and drown in the milk.

Straining the Milk. "In New York State an [health] inspector following the trail of disease in a small city traced it to impure milk supplied by a certain farm. In the absence of the man he insisted on inspecting the dairy arrangements, being followed from room to room by the farmer's indignant wife. Finally he said, 'Show me the strainer which you use in the milk,' and she brought an old shirt, very much soiled. Looking at it in dismay the inspector said, 'Could you not, at least, use a clean shirt?' At this the woman's patience gave way and she declared, 'Well, you needn't expect me to use a clean shirt to strain dirty milk!'" Warren H. Wilson, 1912.  (Not totally a joke: a 1911 St. Louis report had 41% of the milk being sold with over 10,000,000 bacteria per CC.) 

Interestingly, in 1913 a San Francisco Board of Health official advised against modern milk regulation with this dumb statement:  "Pasteurization will put back improvements on the source of supply and encourage dirty habits, the farmer understanding that it is not necessary to be particular, since the dirt that gets in is going to be cooked and made harmless."

Other Curmudgeon Unmentionables. Dog hair and bones in the dirty dumpster behind an oriental restaurant; fast food employee wipes a table, blows his nose into the cloth, and continues to wipe the table; hospital kitchen employee sees a spill on the floor, wipes it up, and then continues to wipe the food work counter; butcher drops a big chunk of meat on the floor, picks it up, and continues work; rat excreta stuck in a thick layer of condensed grease and dirt on top of the exhaust hood above a stove, and below, a frying pan with old congealed grease embroidered by little tooth marks and tiny foot prints; the bottom compartment of a butcher's band saw machine never opened and cleaned. The blade of the saw, every time it is used, passes through an accumulation of old meat and bone residue that is topped with a generous sprinkling of mice feces.

Reading public, these true anecdotes are the reasons that we have retail food laws and inspections by experienced professionals! Granted, many of the descriptions deal with aesthetics that may have limited health implication. Granted also, nine out of ten food facilities today are quite clean and many have detailed food safety programs such as HACCP ("Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point") to detect and control food poisoning risk. But in Curmudgeon's experience--before he got too old to work and had to retire and compose web pages--there is a small percentage of places-you-wouldn't-take-your-dog-to-eat that need the full application of food law. Some 76 million people are sickened in the U.S. every year by food poisoning!

Curmudgeon's Excuse. Curmudgeon intended to present a brief history of food law, starting with biblical caveats, Assize Bread and Beer Laws, regulation in Victorian England, biographicate the glorious pure food hero of American history, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, and then conclude with the contributions of the Roosevelt Presidents. However, most of this is dull and is available elsewhere. Stories about virgin pigs and rat shit sliding down a greasy kitchen exhaust hood are more interesting. Next time.

Kermit McKemie mailto:kmckemie@astound.net