Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Restaurant Health Inspections Work
Episode Date: June 29, 2024If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know the feeling that occurs when the health inspector pays a visit. While nerve wracking, it's the best insurance patrons have that their food will be prepa...red and served in a proper environment. Learn all about how these inspections work, from their past history to current incarnation, in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hi everyone, it's Josh here.
And for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode
on restaurant inspections.
It may just put you off eating at restaurants ever again.
I know it did for me.
I haven't eaten in a restaurant since we released this episode,
and that was back in 2017.
Hold on, hold on, everyone. I'm sorry.
Huh? Okay. 2017. Hold on, hold on everyone, I'm sorry.
Everyone, apparently that is not true. I do still eat at restaurants, who knew? But
at any rate, I hope you enjoy the stomach churning select.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles, W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland.
Put the three of us in the room together with some raw chicken and some old mop water, you
got yourself Stuff you should know.
So gross.
So, Chuck, have you ever been to a restaurant
and seen something that you weren't supposed to see
and been like, oh, I just ate here?
I used to work at restaurants, as you know,
and some of them were pretty gross.
I worked at a couple myself,
and I never saw anything that I was like,
this is wrong, but I realized over the years that I'm in the minority in that sense.
Dude, my first job as a busboy, that was one of, I saw some of the most horrific things in my life.
Mainly because they had, oh man, it was the people that worked there.
They were dirty folks.
They were dirty folks and they were just, they were people that didn't care about their own personal health and hygiene in any way.
It was all gross, gross, gross. I saw a guy one time. Should I even say this?
Yes, please, gross. I saw a guy one time. Should I even say this?
Yes, please, dish.
And you're talking about kids working in the kitchen
that are gross, like drop, high school dropouts,
and hey, I'm not knocking you if you drop out of high school.
Go get that GED and keep at it.
But these were not those people.
They couldn't even spell GED.
Right.
They're like, I didn't get my GED.
Yeah. So these people, they were gross people.
And I was 13 and I couldn't speak up.
I didn't know, like, I'm not going to go to the owner of the restaurant at 13,
because he didn't care.
But I saw one of these dishwashers go into a walk-in cooler,
and he was so mad about the schedule that they put him on, he took the lid off of a big, you know,
15 gallon pot of Brunswick stew.
Oh no.
And he put his, his shoeed foot and leg into it.
No.
All the way to the bottom and then took it back out.
Bleh, bleh.
And let me tell you, man, those shoes,
I've never had more disgusting clothing in my life
than the clothes that I worked in at a barbecue restaurant.
I know. They're like the whole reason crocs are in business
is because it's the only thing that won't slide across
the greasy, dirty floor of every single restaurant
in every single city in the entire world.
Everything about that job was disgusting.
They would drop meat on the ground and say,
good catch, and laugh, and then pick it up off the floor.
Oh, man.
It was like Upton Sinclair's...
The jungle.
The jungle, like right before my little 13-year-old dies.
I grew up on that job in many, many ways.
The only way that it could have been more like the jungle
is if somebody actually died in the Brunswick stew
and they just kept him in there.
It was so foul, dude.
That's grody, man.
I don't even know what our restaurant inspection score was.
I didn't even, I saw nothing like that
at the restaurants I worked at.
I worked at a handful of them, nothing like that.
Yeah, I worked at a bunch more
and it was nothing like that.
This was cesspool.
So that was the worst of the worst.
Oh my god.
They're all burning in hell now.
That's so gross.
I trod by that place the other day on the way to Emily's parents. I went a different
route and now it's like a...
Chi-chis?
A title max.
Oh, okay.
Which I don't even know what that is.
You can pawn your car title there for extremely exorbitant interest rates.
Gotcha. Well, the ghosts of Redneck's Pass dwell within those floors?
Wow, man.
Was the barbecue any good?
I guess it's a moot point, right?
I still ate there.
Oh, dude. After the shoe thing?
Yeah, man. I was a kid. I didn't know. I mean, I didn't have Brunswick Stew that day.
Okay, good.
Or ever again?
I don't know. I just, I didn't know anyunswick stew that day. Okay, good. Or ever again? I don't know.
I just, I didn't know any better.
I was dumb.
You ate the Brunswick stew, Chuck, didn't you?
I got a lot smarter after that.
Well, again, I've never seen anything in person,
but I've been on the internet and seen things
like that guy who peed in the coffee apparently every day.
But I think that was at an office, not a restaurant.
There's like this laundry list of fingers
being found in food.
I saw an article, I think on like MPR or something.
And it was like just basically the top five times
fingers were found in food at restaurants.
And it happens a lot.
Yeah, just quickly, I should say that say that I feel bad for restaurant owners sometimes,
especially at places like that, that it's not like some nice kind of place in town.
You can do all you can do, but you still can't account for some little jerk employee
that's mad about something that wants to spit in someone's food on camera.
You know?
You can't just, you can't watch everyone 100% of the time.
And that's usually what is a case like that, like this dumb dishwasher kid.
He just goes on the walk-ins and says, watch this.
Right, and there's, I saw, like there's a case to be made then for not hiring young people.
Yeah.
You hire people who have like built a background for themselves, like a career for themselves already.
Those are called good restaurants.
Right.
That's the difference.
Yeah, I guess that is the difference.
So in a sense, it's very much the owner's fault for being a cheap bastard and hiring people who put their shoe foot in the Brunswick stew.
Okay, so my point is this, Chuck,
that the shoe foot, the fingers in the Arby's,
like all these little things that are just horrible
and horrific and disgusting would be vastly worse and vastly more frequent.
Were it not for a lone group of people,
the thin blue line between us and utter chaos
when it comes to restaurants, the health inspector.
Yeah, this was, I'm so excited about this episode.
Yeah, it's gonna be a good one, man.
Like, I don't know, when you sent it over,
I was like, all right.
But then I started reading and it was interesting
and awesome and-
There's history to it?
Yeah, and one of these consumer advocacy shows
that we love to do.
We're doing our little rough-nator impression.
Man, I love that guy.
Great American.
He's the tops.
So, Restaurant health inspectors are something of a newish invention.
They're certainly not really old because, at least in the United States,
it wasn't until that book you mentioned, The Jungle, was published in 1905
that people really sat up and took
notice and Congress acted almost immediately, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act the next
year.
That's the impact that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had.
Yeah, rightfully so.
And in the book, he went undercover.
He was a muckraking journalist, God bless him. And he went undercover to basically just take notes on all the horrible things he saw in
the meatpacking industry and slaughterhouses.
And he chronicled all the inhumane things that he saw and the way the animals were treated.
But he also saw the inhumane ways the workers were treated.
But his book had this impact and Congress actually acted and they created the Pure Food and Drug Act.
And one of the things that came out of that was what came to be known as the Food Code.
And the Food Code is basically like, here are the things that you should be doing in your restaurant
to prevent from running afoul of the law or creating foodborne illnesses. Yeah, and like previous to this, states were kind of taking care of their own health issues
as best they could on their own. But then when that book came out, people were like,
wait a minute, they're shipping meat across state lines, so the states aren't taking care of it themselves.
This meat's going out everywhere. So it became a federal thing to be regulated.
They made a federal case out of it.
Well, they did. And along with the Pure Food and Drug Act,
very importantly, the Federal Meat Inspection Act was passed in that same year.
Because I think everyone, I mean, even back then,
like if you're grossed out in 1906, then they weren't as sensitive as we are today.
So there was some gnarly stuff going on.
Dude, a guy falling into like a hot dog grinder? Come on.
So the food code, the early food code that is, was sort of kind of the same stuff that we see today generally.
We have refined everything over the years with science as to what's truly dangerous and not and how it
gets dangerous. But even back then, they were concerned
about, like, proper meat storage and food storage and
temperatures of things and the hygiene of employees and
the premises themselves.
Yeah, because, you know, basically what constitutes
good practices hasn't changed all that much,
but to respond to changes that do come about, that do change best practices or our understanding
of the science of like foodborne illnesses, the food code was republished every year starting
in 1993.
Every two years, they updated it and republished every year starting in 1993. Every two years they updated it and
republished it. And then in 2001 they moved it to four years. But that to me is like,
that friends is the reason we pay taxes. So that there are people who are going around
finding out the most cutting edge understanding of how we get sick from foods at restaurants, then also finding
out the exact ways to prevent this from happening, publishing it into a book and distributing
it to the states who then put it into practice.
It takes money to do this kind of thing, but that's why we pay taxes.
The next time somebody tells you that they don't care about government regulations and
that we live in a nanny state, you remind them of what it would be like if they ate out of the restaurant
without this kind of stuff.
Yeah, those people.
We don't need government regulating stuff.
All right, sir, then you will be eating eyeball.
Right.
You'll be eating human eyeball in your next Frankfurter.
I will feed it to you myself.
So the food code today, just like the very first one back in 1934, is voluntary.
It is not federal law.
It is still up to those states to go out and write their own rules.
It aligns generally with the federal regulations and what the FDA recommends.
And then it gets a little more confusing because when it comes down to actual restaurant inspections,
there is no federal or state inspector that comes in there.
It's the city or the county who's going to be carrying this out.
And they work with the state and then in turn the federal government to kind of all be on the same page. Right, yeah, I think it's almost kind of like the government's the one who has the funding
to go actually look around and survey and find the science and put these best practices
out, but it's the county or the city where the rubber meets the road.
The shoe meets the pavement more likely.
Where the shoe meets the Brunswick stew.
That's so right. Not the Brunswick stew. Gross. That's so rotten.
Not the Brunswick stew.
That's like one of the best things
I had at a barbecue place.
Let's take a break, shall we?
And I'm gonna go brush my tongue with a toothbrush.
Okay.
And I'll be right back.
All right. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as
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Starting this May, join host Martine Hackett for season three of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Auto
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Okay, and we're back and Chuck let me smell your breath. How's that? Man? That is nice the Listerine
Yeah, if I do detect is that Tom's toothpaste you used
No, okay What toothpaste do you use I use Tom's toothpaste you used? No. Okay.
What toothpaste do you use?
I use, uh,
I'm using Crest right now.
Which one? The orange one?
No. The orange.
Yeah, so the color of the packaging is orange,
but the type of mint, it's like called citrus mint, but you would never, if
you didn't see that, you wouldn't be like, oh, this is citrus mint. It's just its own
type of very pleasant mint flavor sensation.
Yeah, I just use the regular, not the white, but I think it's like the blue crest right
now.
Pro health, I think.
Yeah, yeah, pro health. And then a dude used the Listerine now.
I've been on that for a solid couple of years.
Yeah.
Because it's six in one, six benefits in one.
Why are we talking about this?
I don't know.
Man, we're not even getting paid for that.
Maybe mine is, maybe mine is Aqua Fresh.
It's either Aqua Fresh or Cress,
whichever one makes citrus mint, that's what I use.
But do you remember AIM?
Oh yeah, what was that?
So that stuff, I think it's still around.
It actually doesn't do anything
as far as brushing your teeth goes,
as far as toothpaste goes.
But remember it came out in three different colors,
like green, red, and white, and it was just pretty.
But it's bad toothpaste.
I don't know, I'm not a big fan of it,
but I love looking at it, how about that?
Yeah, I remember that.
All right, so back to food inspection.
Now that our mouths are clean,
there are usually three kinds of food safety inspections.
You got your reg, the one that's done on the reg,
it's known as a routine inspection,
and that's the one where they come in,
might be every six months, might be every year and a half or so,
depending on some stuff we'll get to here in a bit.
And that's the one where you go in and you just see the thing on the wall that gives it the score.
That's the one where you're working in the restaurant,
and the owner and the manager freak out.
They're like, oh, God, no, no.
They do the second they walk through the door, although I will say in New Jersey where
I worked at the store in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, we were always great. They took it
really seriously. Every time the inspector came by, they were like, come on in.
That's the way it should be.
It's a big shout out to the store in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
Way to go to the store.
That place is great. And they had a restaurant group, and they had like six restaurants,
and they were all done the right way.
I don't think you could really have a restaurant group
without approaching food inspection
and health standards in that way too.
Yeah, I mean, it's just dumb not to.
And from what I saw too, we also kind of,
did you read that Mental Floss article I sent?
Yeah.
So one of the things, it's called 12 Secrets
of Restaurant Health Inspectors, one of the things, it's called 12 Secrets of Restaurant Health Inspectors,
one of the things they point out is that usually the bigger the chain,
so whether it's a restaurant group on up to a global chain like, you know,
one of those guys, sure.
Oh wow, jinx buddy.
You're probably going to see something close to a hundred every time. And the reason why is because they have a lot of skin in the game.
They have a lot to lose, right?
If, like, they pointed out with Chipotle,
like there were one or two locations of Chipotle's where
some bad cilantro got some people sick with E. coli.
But all Chipotle suffered as a result.
People just stopped going, they lost hundreds of millions of dollars
and came probably pretty close to going under there
for a little while.
And I think they're still definitely clawing their way out
from under it.
So they don't just rely on state, county,
or city health inspectors, they do their own.
They hire their own third parties to come in
and carry out health inspections much more
frequently than the government's doing just to make sure that they're up to standards.
Yeah.
So your local fast food chain is more likely to be super clean than the mom and pop in
theory, but in my opinion, you're also more likely going to find the kid in the kitchen
that goes, hey, watch this.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's definitely a trade-off.
And that's it, yeah, because it's definitely not to say that, you know,
mom and pop places are inherently unsafe.
If it's a family business, you have just as much skin in the game as a global restaurant chain
because this is your family's livelihood, so yeah, you're going to take it seriously.
So getting back to the other two types of inspections real quick, besides the routine,
are the follow-up investigation where they do say, like, all right, you need to fix these
things, I'll be back next Thursday.
Or I'll be back tomorrow, depending on what's going on.
Or I'll shut down your restaurant while you fix this stuff, it's so bad.
And then there are inspections that are triggered by consumer complaints.
Yes.
That's the one where they like use the bat signal, but instead of a bat, it's like a
fork in the sky.
And then the restaurant inspector swoops in and is like, I'm here, I'm here everybody,
calm down.
Yeah.
So I mentioned that people, restaurants will be inspected maybe every six months, maybe
every year, a year and a half. They are, it's not willy-nilly, they are assessed a risk factor as an establishment
by the county or the, you know, whatever local municipality is carrying this out.
And that has to do with a bunch of things.
Sometimes it's the kind of food, like if you're serving sushi, you might get inspected a little more.
Sushi.
Sushi, because you're serving raw fish.
I didn't say sushi that done. Sushi that done, did I?
No, no, no.
Oh, no, that's Steve Brule.
Steve Brule. Sushi sandwich.
Sushi sandwich. I thought it was my missing tooth.
No.
Or if you're cooking meat or whatever, raw meat, you might get inspected a little more than a deli that just has, you know, pre-prepared meats and foods.
Yeah, like those cold cuts are already cooked. It's not like they're serving you raw turkey slices.
Like it's already cooked, they're just putting it together onto a sandwich. That's a low-risk restaurant, comparatively speaking. Yeah, you know what always gets me, even though I love a gyro, is when I see the thing
on the spit next to the heat lamp rotating around.
I always just think, how safe is that?
I would guess if it's operating in the United States,
safe enough.
Okay.
That's the whole point of restaurant inspectors,
so that you don't have to ask that question.
That you can look at that and say,
somebody who knows what they're doing
has inspected that and determined
that that is not a threat to my health.
Maybe it just creeps me out to look at it.
No, I'm with you, I understand.
I also wanna say there are some places
where you go in and you're like,
this is clearly in violation of some health codes.
I have no idea how this place
is allowed to stay like this, but it's still worth it.
And I would direct you to Ann's, Ann's Ghetto Burger.
Oh yeah.
Right by your house.
Yeah, that's just down the street.
Yes, have you had one?
I've never had an Ann's because I thought that she left
and it closed, but it's still going.
Is she still running it, do you know?
I don't know.
She had been threatening to like retire
for 20 years or something,
but I knew she wanted to get balled out
and didn't want to just close it down.
So hopefully she was able to retire.
That's my hope.
All I know is the Wall Street Journal said it was,
I think it may be the best hamburger in the United States.
The Wall Street Journal ain't lying.
You know?
Yes.
But if you go there, that's like decades worth of grease
just on the vent around the back splash,
like the stainless steel back splash or whatever,
splatter guard behind the griddle.
And you're like, how does she get away with that?
And then you take a bite of it and you're like, oh, because it matters not at all compared to this burger.
Well, maybe she is compliant
because that is the second risk factor involved
with how often you're going to get inspected,
which is if you have a list of complaints
or a record of violations on your record,
then you're going to be on their frequent visitor list.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
And especially if you've ever been the source of a foodborne illness,
you're on a high risk automatically.
Yeah, probably permanently.
Yeah, I would think so.
And depending on where you are, you know,
like you're going to get lots of visits after that.
That's probably, aside from maybe people getting shot
in your restaurant, a foodborne illness
is probably the worst thing that can happen
in your restaurant, I would guess.
And whether you're a new restaurant,
well, if you're a new restaurant in particular,
I should say, I think the standard is,
is that depending on where you fall as far as what kind of restaurant you are, whether you're
a deli serving cold cuts or a sushi place serving raw seafood, you're assigned like
an initial risk assessment.
And then depending on that risk assessment, if you're a sushi place, say they're going
to come visit every three months for the first year, or if you're a del place, say they're going to come visit every three months for the first year or if you're a
Deli they might come once every year and a half and then
Depending on how you perform in those
Inspections those regular routine inspections that are basically predetermined by the type of restaurant you are that that schedule can either
Diminish or increase so let's say that deli is found to be in violation pretty frequently every 18 months, they're
going to start getting inspected every 12 months or every 6 months.
Or that sushi place that's getting inspected every 3 months or 6 months, if it's just
painfully obvious that they are top notch pros who are taking this quite seriously and
never get caught for anything,
then that three or six months may end up turning into a year. Who knows?
Yeah, you may have heard reports on the news, too, that food inspectors have racist policies
where they will go after ethnic restaurants more often.
No, I hadn't heard that. Is that right?
Yeah, I've seen reports on stuff like that.
Wow.
That they get inspected more frequently if you're like having an ethnic restaurant.
That's pretty rotten.
But there is a food safety expert at North Carolina State named Ben Chapman that says there's really no data to back that up.
He said, but there could be biases through consumer complaint systems.
Oh, I see. And they did sort of just a snapshot from Yelp reviews, which, say what you want about
Yelp reviews, they're pretty much the worst thing ever.
Right.
But if you look at Yelp reviews, you do a search for food poisoning, and close to 70%
of the time they were ethnic restaurants where people complained
about food poisoning.
So...
I see this food is weird.
It is possible.
I don't recognize it.
That some bias comes in through that.
But that makes sense then, Chuck.
Like if Yelp is a proxy for the number of times somebody might call in a complaint,
that's one of the ways that a food inspector
goes out to inspect a restaurant
is when somebody, the public, calls and says something
or complains.
So, I mean, that makes utter and complete sense.
Have you ever called and complained about a restaurant?
Have you ever called the health department?
No.
I never have either, and they've actually,
after researching this article, I was like, I can think of at least one time. I never have either and they're actually after researching this article I was like
there I can think of at least one time when I could have and should have called just got under cooked chicken and
you me and I both got very sick for like the whole weekend and I kept calling this place like
like what are you guys going to do about this you have to do something and um
they just got less and less interested
the more frequently I called them.
By like the fourth or fifth time I was like,
we're still suffering, I just wanted to let you know.
We're laying around throwing up.
Wow.
And they didn't do anything about it.
There was no, we're sorry.
I think they actually didn't believe me maybe,
but now that I've read this I'm like,
I totally should have called the health department
on those guys for that.
What city was this?
It was in Atlanta.
I think I remember that actually.
We got, so we were sick for an entire weekend.
It was a pretty nice place too, right?
Yes, yeah.
I totally remember that story.
Right across from where we used to work,
in Buckhead actually.
And they could not have cared less,
and that's what ticked me off.
Oh, you were calling the restaurant over. Yes. Yeah
Yeah, I thought you called the health inspector over no, but now now I'm like why wouldn't why yeah
We just call it health inspector not now. I would call for sure now that I've done this research because it's not like
Like what you're doing is helping other people from from before from the same fate befalling. Yeah, you're not being a rat. Right, right.
Which is another thing that health inspectors look out for.
All right, well, let's talk about that.
When you, when, this is how this goes down.
There are unannounced visits, like I said.
So I've worked at, I've worked at, I don't know,
like probably four or five places over the years.
And two of them were pretty bad.
The aforementioned barbecue place and then where I worked in college wasn't terrible,
but it wasn't great.
It was a typical, like, college town Mexican joint.
But it wasn't like the super professional other restaurants that I've worked at.
But at those first two places, I remember when the
restaurant inspector walked through the door, a panic set in. Invariably, one of the,
like the GM or whoever the manager was, would immediately confront, not confront,
but greet the person and send, you know, the understanding was someone go back to
the kitchen and tell everyone that the
inspector is here. And judging from that mental
floss article you sent, that's exactly how it works.
And for that reason, the very first thing a good
health inspector does is kind of barge through there
and say, I'm going straight to the kitchen right the
second. Because they know what's going on.
Right. They have to or else a whole bunch of violations get covered up really quickly.
Very quickly.
And so in that Mental Floss article basically they said they needed to do like a brisk like
run walk through the kitchen as fast as they could.
Isn't that scary?
It is.
But it's also like, you, you scels, like what do you do?
And like just stand there and freeze. That's what they should do is be like, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,
you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, three to four minutes. Right. But that's the thing. But I mean, it could be anything.
Like there's like, if you are sitting there making food
and you have like a cup of Coke, right?
You're not supposed to have that there.
Yeah, or in your cell phone in the kitchen.
It's another big one too.
I'll bet that is probably the most frequent violation today.
They're covered in poop. Do you ever see some, like, have you ever just stopped and looked at people on the street
like with their phones?
Like they'll just be stopped mid something.
Like they have like a shovel like propped up against their shoulder just looking at
their phone with their mouth hanging open and it's like crazy.
Returning into like a society of zombies, man.
How do you stare at your phone?
I've seen you do that.
You do it in a smarter looking way.
I do the thing where I'm like stroking my chin thoughtfully.
Right, your mouth is closed.
Exactly. I've got like one eyebrow arched.
All right, so the first thing they inspect, obviously the kitchen,
the manager, the owner, whoever is there on point,
is with the inspector the whole time. Because they're saying like, hey, like little things like that ketchup bottle is disgusting.
Like why don't you go ahead and have someone clean that up.
I won't dock you a point, but just get it clean.
And the guy wipes it down, he's like, no that brand, it's Hunt.
So, I mean, get some Hines in here.
It's disgusting.
But the first things they inspect are the dynamic areas, which are the kitchen, food
preparation areas.
Basically anywhere where there's food actively out is the first place they'll go.
Right.
That's the static area or dynamic?
That's the dynamic.
Okay.
And then you start with 100 points, by the way.
I don't know if we mentioned that.
Which I think is kind of optimistic.
It's saying like, I want to believe the best in you, so everybody starts with 100 and then
we start deducting from there.
Yeah, then it just gets sad.
So one of the first things they're looking for is employee hygiene.
Because remember what you mentioned like way back when the Food and Drug Act was created
and the food code was first established,
there were a lot of basic tenets that were put forth back then.
And one of them was the people who cook the food
need to be clean as a whistle.
And that's one of the big things
that the health inspector's looking for.
Like, are they wearing gloves?
Which, by the way, is not to say
that if an employee's wearing gloves
that you're totally covered.
The gloves are supposed to be a fail safe to good hand washing. So you want them to be washing their
hands very frequently and then wearing gloves on top of that. But then on top of that, not
doing things like using their cell phone with the gloves on because you've just automatically
contaminated them and totally defeated the purpose of using gloves
at that point, right?
So there's a lot of hygiene things
that are being taken into account,
but how do you tell whether people are washing their hands
when you're just walking into a kitchen?
Of course they're gonna wash their hands in front of you
in the way that they're supposed to be,
but how do you know they're doing it routinely, Chuck?
Well, yeah, and we should say that there is a way
you're supposed to wash the hands.
You don't rinse them off and just dry them
with the towel that's sitting by the sink.
Or just blow on them.
You rinse, you put on the soap, you scrub for 20 seconds,
then you dry off with a one-use towel.
And good old unsustainable made out of tree paper towel
Yeah, or if you're really fancy restaurant you can just have like cashmere towels laying around long as you throw them away afterward Right you have to throw away
But your little trick and know where you were leading how you can tell is this one very crafty restaurant inspector in the middle floss
Article said they go in the first thing they do because it takes takes them a couple hours at just sort of a normal-sized restaurant, four or five hours at a big, like,
hotel restaurant.
He said he puts an X on the paper towels, and if he goes back at the end of his inspection
and that X is still on the paper towel, then he knows hands are not being washed.
Very sneaky.
Pretty clever.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess we just gave it away though.
So now all the people are gonna go check
their paper towel rolls.
I bet there are other ways.
Yeah, that was just a setup to nudge them
into the actual way he's telling.
Yeah, like wash your hands.
Food is another big one too, right?
You wanna make sure that the food is being properly stored
and properly cooked.
And apparently there is a danger zone
between I think like zero and 140
that you wanna hit or that you wanna stay outside of.
So basically you want your food,
especially like raw meat to be stored
at a temperature frozen, right, or else kept at
40 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees Celsius, or below for fridges.
And then when you cook it, you have to cook it to at least 160 degrees internal temperature
for beef, pork, all those guys, and then 145 for fish.
And if a restaurant's not doing that, that's a big one, as we'll see.
Yeah, I mean, the best way to think about food storage is,
without getting into the specific temperatures,
is if it's supposed to be cold or frozen,
it should be cold or frozen.
If it's supposed to be hot, it should be hot.
It's that middle ground is where you're in big trouble.
Exactly.
They talk about lukewarm being the big enemy.
Right.
That's never good.
Lukewarm? I'm trying to think of a time when lukewarm is preferable with anything.
No. It just sounds gross.
I like my food really hot too.
Yeah.
Like that's the one thing I will send something back,
is if it was clearly made a little earlier than the rest of the party at the table,
and it's sort of lukewarm, I'm like, no man, I want steam coming off this thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's never...
So they throw it in the microwave.
Yeah, they do. And then they're like, oh, I guess you want a little spit on that too.
Apparently soup should be, like the way you reheat things is a big deal,
because obviously their Brunswick stew, you know, just throw it out every night,
you put it back in the walk-in so some jerk can step in it.
But when you bring soups and broths back to heat,
you have to reboil them entirely from their refrigerated state.
Which makes sense, but that's never very good for food.
If it's already prepared, once you re-boil it,
that's probably, you're just going to want to throw that away then.
Really?
Yeah, man, it toughens everything up or else it overcooks it.
It's already been cooked once, so when you bring it to a boil,
you're really cooking it again.
And for foodborne illnesses, that's a good way to treat it, but it doesn't necessarily
make for the most appetizing food.
All right.
I don't know if I agree with that, but that's all right.
That's what I'm going with.
Frozen meat, you don't just say, hey, Jimmy, throw that frozen bird out on the table and
leave it there until this evening.
Right.
But you don't just leave food out to thaw.
There are proper ways of thawing and bringing things back to the correct temperature.
Right.
And then so let's say you have a place where you're cutting up that thawed chicken that
was properly thawed, and then you set the knife down and somebody else picks it up and
they start cutting lettuce with it.
That's cross-contamination.
That is extremely dangerous because, as you you know very few people cook their lettuce
before they eat it in a salad, it's raw.
And so now it has raw chicken juice on the lettuce
that you're eating raw and uncooked
and you can die from that.
So cross contamination is a big one they look for.
They also, it can be a little more simple
like with something like silverware.
From what I saw if the silverware is dirty or smudgy,
that is a big problem because that means
usually that the whole kitchen is dirty.
There's a lot of, that's like a big red flag
that apparently health inspectors will tell you
that if the silverware is dirty,
it usually is indicative of just a dirty restaurant
in general.
Yeah.
And I've always heard, I don't know if it's an urban
legend or not, but you know like the,
just the plastic soda cups that like a lot of restaurants
will have?
Mm-hmm.
Have you ever heard that it's not possible for them
to get to the temperature needed to kill any bacteria on them because they'll melt otherwise.
I have not heard that.
So that when you drink out of them, they've not really been sanitized from before.
I have not heard that, but as someone who has worked as a dishwasher, you don't say,
well, I'm going to wash these things at this temperature. You just throw everything through there.
Yeah, you don't have any choice in what temperature
it's all prescribed for you.
You're just basically putting them on the tray
and sliding them through, pulling the door down,
and then it washes them, and then you lift the door up
and pull them out.
Yes, and I will say one of my dreams, though,
is to have one of those in my home.
Those, I can't remember what they're called,
but they are wonderful.
It's pretty great.
Yeah.
It just washes everything like super fast.
So that's the dynamic areas, right?
Yes.
There's also the static areas where it's things like, well, the
dishwashing area actually apparently is a static area.
It doesn't change very much.
Where you store cleaning products, that kind of stuff.
Uh-huh.
I guess you get points deducted if your cleaning products or your
toxic chemicals are not in their marked original
package.
Yeah, that's not good.
Because they can be mistaken for oil and vinegar or something like that.
Yeah, and they're going to check the static areas include a lot of things that you don't
think would even fall under the purview of a restaurant inspector.
They're going to look at your HVAC systems and your vents and your smoke detectors.
They're going to look at your dining room and the floors and the ceilings and your ceiling
fans and your dumpster behind and your grease trap.
They look at everything.
Right.
Which is good.
And another one that they take a look at that I think is probably a big problem for restaurants
in a lot of ways are ice machines.
There's a lot of parts to ice machines that are out of view.
This thing scared me in mental flaws now.
That can like grow mold pretty easy.
And not just the ice machine, right, where they're like scooping ice out,
which is another thing too, like there better be an ice scoop, right?
It can grow mold in the ice machine.
But also those chutes where ice comes out
of like a beverage dispenser,
those are usually serviced by the company
that makes the beverages that it's dispensing.
And so it would be up to that company to clean those out,
which means that they get even less attention
than the rest of the restaurant.
So the next time you're getting ice
out of a beverage dispenser, like get your flashlight out of your pocket and look up there and see
if you see any mold and then just raise holy hell if you do.
Yeah, and I'm not a big fan of the serve yourself soft drink stations anyway for, you know,
out there with the public. I don't think the public should ever have access to something.
That's why, well, that's not the reason, but buffets are just so gross and creepy.
I haven't been to a buffet in, good lord, I don't know, 20 years.
Yeah, I know.
But you should, the thought of a buffet, I know they have the sneeze guard, but people
like scooping in and serving themselves their own food from a trough is so weird and gross and archaic
that I can't believe people still do that.
Well, I mean, also, like, even if you're using, like, a spoon,
like a serving spoon to scoop something out,
which you are,
so did the person before you, right?
And that means you're touching the same serving spoon
and then going back and using your hands to go eat.
So you just touched whatever the other person had
on their hands and now you're coming in contact
with your mouth.
It's a flawed system for sure.
It is because what you're saying is,
I'm gonna count on the 300 people that have eaten here
today before me are all completely hygienic.
All their hands have been washed.
Yeah, Timothy poop hands isn't among them.
No one did a single gross thing,
like if a tater tot fell off the spoon,
flicked it back in with their finger.
Like no one did anything wrong at all.
I just, no way.
Not even at like Whole Foods or someplace.
Those are all gross to me.
Oh yeah, Whole Foods would count with that too, huh?
Although I do like to build your own salad thing every once in a while.
That's the exception.
Good salad bar?
Yeah.
It's tough to turn down. I'm with you.
Well let's take a break, think a little more about salads,
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All right, we're back, Charles.
Let's talk about point deductions, eh?
Yes, let's. Remember we said that restaurant inspectors are very optimistic
and they start out with a hundred.
It just goes down from there.
And again, you know, since these are done like city by city
or county by county, like everybody has like their own
methods or whatever, but usually, and I think the FDA
has pointed out like there are five things that you're
really looking for, like five general categories.
Improper storage of food as far as temperature goes.
Yes.
Inadequately cooked food, equipment that's contaminated,
sources that are unsafe,
that are an unsafe supply of the ingredients, right?
So like, if it turns out like the goat is coming
from their buddy's farm, that might be a problem.
And then personal hygiene of the people
who work there, right?
Right.
And so depending on some of those,
especially if there's multiple ones of these,
these are big ones,
they will probably be a high priority,
type one or critical violation, any of those.
Yes.
And then there's also other ones where like,
this is not that big of a deal,
but it's definitely something that needs to be paid
attention to.
Those fall after those usually,
and it can be anything from like a dented can
that could conceivably contain botulism,
but definitely hasn't been proven to contain botulism
being thrown away to there being a hole in the screen door
that's left open for some reason.
Yeah, and these, as far as deducting individual points that you'll see on the wall when you walk in,
and if you don't look at that piece of paper when you walk into a restaurant,
I don't know what's going on in your brain, you should always do that.
But like a static violation, like hey, there were some chairs that had bad legs,
your ceiling fan was pretty dusty, those would be like a point each.
Maybe a couple of points for a minor infraction, like your cleaning product, like I found a roach,
you know, the chef has a cell phone in the kitchen, that's a couple of points.
All the way up to four and five points, and that's when you're talking about your fridge is broken
and it is not up to temperature and everything in there is at risk. And that's when they can
actually shut you down until you get it fixed.
Yeah, which I got the impression from this article that
that is a rarity, that the health inspector wants to
err on the side of the restaurant staying open and
solving everything as quickly as it can while also its
business not suffering unnecessarily.
So if your restaurant gets shut down temporarily,
like that violation was significant enough
that people were at an immediate risk
of getting sick from visiting your restaurant.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's a big deal in other words.
It's as big a deal as you would think.
Yeah, but with those point deductions,
if you go in and you see like a 72 on a restaurant
score sheet, it's probably not 28 individual small violations.
There are probably some four and five pointers in there, and you should probably think about
eating there.
Or, you know, it says in this article, you can go to the website and really break down,
because those aren't for the public to necessarily
be able to digest easily.
But if you do look at them, if you can get close to them,
you can actually look and see the little category
for each thing.
Sometimes behind the register,
they may not like you poking around.
Well, the health departments usually put them on the web these days.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, you can investigate online.
Okay.
But in the restaurant itself, it is marked.
It's, you know, a bunch of tiny little letters and categories.
And you can give it a look and, you know, as long as,
I wouldn't spend too much time there.
Like, just go by that initial score, and if you're really like,
I got to see what those 18 points were deducted for,
I would just turn around and walk out.
Right, yeah.
Especially if there's an identical place, like right across the street.
Yeah.
But that is a pretty good point, because when you think about it,
most people just see that big score prominently displayed,
whether it's like an A or a B or a C or like an 85 or a 98 or whatever.
And it's not really meant to be shorthand for the public.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess it is in a way where it's like,
hey, buddy, you're really taking a gamble here at like 75.
But when it's really high up, it does seem to be kind of an indicator like this one's
a okay in my book.
That's not really what the restaurant inspection report is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be a lot more granular than that.
And so to really tell whether you're running a risk at eating in a restaurant or not, you
actually do have to go to the trouble of looking up what the violations were.
And then even then judging for yourself,
because short of the health inspector deciding to shut
the restaurant down and making the decision for you
that you can't go there, they're not saying like,
don't eat here.
Like if it passes inspection enough to stay open,
then as far as the county health department's
concerned, it's good enough for you to be eating there, but that might not really jive
with your own definition.
So to get that information, you have to go find out why points were deducted.
Yeah, and you can't, it's either the Mental Plot or our own article point out that just
because some place has a bad rating doesn't mean they haven't
fixed things and it's fine now. And just because
there's a great rating doesn't mean they're not in
violation that day. These inspectors come every six
months to a year for a couple of hours during a
lunch shift and it is a snapshot of what occurred on
that day. So there is no like fail safe for a consumer.
You just got to, you know, do the best you can, cross your fingers.
Yeah, just roll the dice.
And everything's okay in there.
Or just cook at home and boil everything including your lettuce.
Ooh, boiled lettuce.
Delicious.
What?
I'm just kidding.
Oh.
I didn't know if I was missing out on something.
No, no, no.
You got anything else on restaurant inspections?
Just this one more little tidbit from Mental Floss that I thought was pretty great.
Let's hear it.
Is that this one restaurant inspector said that he can smell cockroaches in the air at this point.
Yeah, that's a real problem with cockroaches though, don't you think? To be able to smell...
I guess it'd be an infestation is what he's smelling.
He said, you can walk in, take a deep breath,
and he said it's kind of a nutty, oily smell that you, after years on the job,
I can identify it.
He's like, I still get hungry every time I smell it.
I got a lot of roaches in my house right now, and it's really pissing me off.
It's a clean house, you know?
It's not gross, it's just this summer
was just real kind of muggy and dank.
Do you have a lot of cardboard boxes
in your attic or basement?
No, I don't know where they're coming from.
Like we see them outside all over the place.
So maybe it's that swale pond
from the permaculture episode.
Maybe.
Yeah, the permaculture lady was like,
I forgot to tell you, you're going to have roaches.
This is the only new thing.
Right?
I don't know, man.
Good luck in Godspeed, though.
Go find the most sustainable way to treat it.
I'll be interested to hear what you come up with.
Well, so far it's been the flip-flop method.
Oh, poor roaches. No. If you want
to know more about cockroaches or restaurant health inspections or flip-flops, you can
type those words in the search bar at HouseOfWorks.com and I said that, which means it's time for
listener mail.
All right, I'm going to call this a great gross way to finish this gross-ish podcast.
Excellent. Hey guys, wanted to regale you with a story of how you two contributed to my fantastic
relationship with my wonderful girlfriend.
Last summer and fall I was traveling across the country camping, going to national parks
and I wound up in Moab, Utah at Canyonlands and Arches and met a smart, fun girl at a
brewery and we made a date to go hiking the next day.
Picked her up and we went on a wonderful little hike and disaster struck.
Turns out months of cheddar bratwurst and beer
wasn't great for my digestive system
and I felt horrible and I had an inescapable urge
to take the Browns to the Super Bowl.
Unfortunately, I was miles away from a leaf
and I ran out of excuses to keep stopping
and standing still for a moment.
Hey, look at that arch again.
Oh, thank you.
So I had to tell her the horrible truth on our first date,
and I was sure it would ruin it.
Eventually I made my way to a bathroom,
shoved some poor people aside,
and safely made it back to town.
But I was horribly embarrassed and sure I had ruined everything.
On the way back to town, she asked if she could put a podcast on and she played me your episode
about poop.
Oh nice.
How about that?
She's got a good sense of humor.
Great sense of humor.
Never been as happy to hear two men describing fecal matter.
At that point I knew anyone could spend a date almost pooping in their pants into an
excuse to share their podcast's favorites as a keeper.
We've been together over a year now, and we love listening to your new episodes
while we hike and camp.
And poop.
And poop, I guess.
They've got, remember the love seat
that Saturday Night Live commercial,
where it was like the two toilets facing each other,
so you could hold hands while you pooped?
Exactly.
Couldn't be happier to find a new favorite thing
to listen to, and a wonderful new girlfriend
at the same time, so I want to thank you guys.
If you ever get back to Denver,
maybe next year, we don't know yet.
I'll be buying tickets as soon as I hear the announcement.
That is from Tom.
And he said, if you do read this in the air,
please give a shout out to Alice.
Nice, Tom and Alice.
Yeah.
Way to go, kids.
Thanks for writing in, Tom.
Nice story.
If you want to get in touch with us like Tom did, lay it on us.
Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
For so many people living with an autoimmune condition like myasthenia gravis or chronic
inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, the emotional toll can be as real as the physical
symptoms.
That's why in an all new season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition
from Ruby Studio and Argenics,
host Martine Hackett gets to the heart
of the emotional journey for individuals
living with these conditions.
To find community and inspiration on your journey,
listen now on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hear insightful, entertaining discussions
on today's important health and wellness topics
on the Health Discovered podcast from WebMD.
Through in-depth conversations with experts,
Health Discovered covers everything
from tips for healthier living
to the latest on therapy and mental health.
My goal is to really destigmatize mental health treatment
and looking at it from a whole health perspective.
Physical health and mental health can be intertwined.
Listen to WebMD Health Discovered
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Guys, we are back.
We are so excited.
It is season two of your favorite New Girl Rewatch podcast.
We have got a new season, we got a new name.
We've got some of your favorite people
from the New Girl universe. We've got the creator and
showrunner Liz Merriwether, we got the Max Greenfield, Olivia Munn. We also have some
of your least favorites like like Jake Johnson. I'm Lauren. Hannah, what's up? We do
have Jake Johnson though. Yeah. Listen to the mess around on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.