It made for a stomach-churning list as the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) reported the horrible highlights of what came to its attention last year. Grisliest were a chicken's head in frozen wings and a human tooth in a Chinese takeaway.
A canine in your Cantonese is one thing but roughly two calls a day were made to the authority’s advice line last year about hygiene standards.
This morning I'm going on a food safety inspection in a south Dublin hotel. Some 500 public servants stand between us and a food-borne illness and senior environmental health officer Marie Ryan is one of them. She has the power to inspect restaurants, cafes, supermarkets or shops unannounced.
“I don’t generally eat in the places I inspect. But I have an identical twin sister. I think she has had a few strange looks. By and large I have a very good relationship with the people I inspect.”
Environmental health officers (“please don’t call us health inspectors”, she says) enforce food hygiene rules and have the power to close a food business immediately if they discover a grave risk to public health. Sewage or rodents will typically do it. The good news is Ryan has never seen a live rat on an inspection. Or a rat run – that’s the telltale line of grease left by the rat’s coat en route between lair and food.
Model kitchen
Going on patrol with the filth police is only allowed by the Health Service Executive under
tame circumstances. The Herbert Park Hotel knows we’re coming so we don’t expect to see anything other than a model kitchen and a pristine set of fridge-temperature records and that’s what we found.
However, standards are not as high across Irish food businesses. Last year the FSAI served closure orders on 119 cafes, restaurants and food businesses, a record number and up one-third on 2012 figures.
What’s the worst thing Ryan has seen? “We had a complaint from a woman in the inner city about a premises that we didn’t know about.”
The woman had seen food parcels left outside the door of a lock-up being eaten by rodents. “We went down and we discovered that there was a food business, a chap who was making coleslaw, egg mayonnaise, potato salad and the place was just not fit to be a food business. It wasn’t clean. The window was broken and while I was there a bird flew in and perched on top of the coleslaw machine. He wasn’t very clean himself unfortunately. We had no option on that day but to close him.”
What does she think is behind the increase in closure orders? Recent EU legislation has delivered further powers, she says. And since 2011 there’s a protocol spelling out the number of steps before closure, which has standardised the process. “In my 15 years I haven’t seen a big decrease in standards. On balance, in my experience, standards have probably increased because people are more aware of food safety.”
This morning’s inspection starts at the back door to check the anti-pest measures (double-screen doors and strips of brushing around the edges), once we’ve washed our hands and donned white coats and hats. But sometimes the pests don’t have to make their way into a kitchen. It hasn’t happened here but in other places “we’re seeing cockroaches”, says Ryan. “They tend to come in in second-hand pieces of equipment and more exotic foods. It wouldn’t be the big ones. They would be small, what we call German cockroaches.”
Here the vegetables delivered on the day are stacked upon metal shelves. The rest of the food goes to walk-in fridges. Everything that doesn’t have a printed best-before date has been labelled with the day and time it was prepared. Every morsel of food is documented. Today’s roast-beef sandwich comes with a paper trail of five separate documents recording the meat’s delivery, storage, cooking, cooling and reheating records.
Rare but risky
Some of the hotel's American customers are mystified that the head chef Kevin Ramen
can’t serve them a rare burger. “In future Kevin you can give them my phone number,” jokes Ryan. “Burgers. I would never recommend that they’re served medium rare,” she says.
Not even if they taste better?
“I don’t care. I’ve got my environmental health hat on. They call E-coli 0157H7 the burger bug in the States. Joking aside, I wouldn’t eat a rare burger.”
Later she explains: “It is quite simple for me. I’ve seen what can happen to food that’s not been handled properly. In a situation where you’re feeding a big group of people and you’re feeding them from a big kitchen there are certain controls that have to be put in place and I don’t think you can argue with that. It’s very easy for people to say ‘there’s too much regulation or ‘you’re killing taste’, but I’ve seen first hand people being very very ill.”
Fresh meat is the biggest food safety issue. Much of the inspection centres on preparation areas and storage. The inspection is detailed and meticulous, with Ryan asking questions all the way about food preparation, storage, ventilation, deep-cleaning of bins, hand-washing facilities and how long the cooked rice is stored. She checks fridge temperatures with an infra-red thermometer and spritzer bottles for their disinfectant content.
In the dry storage area she gets down on the floor to check under the shelves. Finally she looks at the HACCP [Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points] folder of critical control points. This convention was developed to prevent astronauts getting food poisoning. “Vomiting in space was not a good idea,” says Ryan.
Environmental health officers are not that scary, she says. After we leave the Herbert Park she visits someone who wants to establish a salad business to give them advice on food safety.
“A hell of a lot of what we do is advice. Every single inspection you’re advising people. It’s only fair. Because they can’t know everything and I do this, day in, day out.”
