How Food Can Become Contaminated

I promise this will be the last post about food handling regulations. After today, it'll be nothing but sausage, sausage, sausage all of the time.

Today was hopefully my last visit to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at 42 Broadway. I was there on Friday with what I understood to be the paperwork required to get my license, but they gave me the runaround—my Social Security card didn’t use my maiden name as my middle name, my tax ID was under an LLC, not my individual name, blah blah. I lost my patience and left. Today it got all squared away because I returned to 42 Broadway with reinforcements—my sausage cart supervisor. She explained to the cantankerous lady behind the glass that my paperwork was indeed correct. The folks working at these NYC government offices are taught to accept only scenario A; in case of scenario B, don’t ask for help or examine any guidelines—just say no. The lady behind the job was following this approach with impressive conviction. I’m surprised anyone can manage to sell food anywhere in this city.

Another (and kinder) lady behind the glass took a photo for my I.D. badge, which should arrive in the mail in a matter of weeks. Six to eight, in fact. That’s how long Sprint told me it would take to process my rebate. Let’s see who’s faster, Sprint or the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Your guess is a good as mine.

In the meantime, I’ve been casting a critical eye on mobile food vending carts. It’s like I’m an unofficial health inspector. The violations are just racking up. The dueling street meat carts of Steinway Street in Astoria, for instance, both have coolers sitting on the sidewalk next to their carts. All components of your operation must be in, on, or under the cart—not on the sidewalk. Carts in Manhattan, at least the busy pedestrian parts, couldn’t get away with that crap.

Then today on the way home from C-Town (a crappy New York grocery store chain) I passed another popular Astoria street meat cart. It always smells so inviting, the sizzling meat gurgling in the bright yellow-orange sauce. Yet I still have to take the plunge of actually stepping up to the cart and getting food—I go to that area to visit C-Town and buy groceries for dinner, not to eat a rice plate while sitting on the curb of C-Town’s parking lot.

Usually while walking past the C-Town street meat cart I focus on the delectable smell, but today I zoned in on the prep areas of their cart. They had sauces stored in the sink, which means a) the sauces were almost definitely in the danger zone between 41 and 140 degrees F, and b) they don’t wash their hands very often, because the sauces would get in the way. Heaped up about six inches high to the side of the flattop was a huge pile of cooked meat, ready to be served, threatening to spill off the flattop and onto the sidewalk. On the opposite side of the cart a compact fry-o-lator churned with hot oil, a few falafels bobbing up and down. Every inch of flat space was taken up with squeeze bottles, Styrofoam containers, steaming cooked food, steaming raw food…

I’ve worked in tight kitchens before. You have to get creative if you want to make tasty food with efficiency. Sometimes you can dream up things to make life easier, clever storage solutions or systems with better flow so you don’t crowd other people’s prep stations. Sometimes, in the process of doing that, you break a sanitary guideline. Sometimes guidelines are dumb, but usually they exist for a pretty good reason. That street meat cart by C-Town was crawling with time-saving health code violations, and I decided it was best to leave them a mystery, so I walked past the cart and into C-Town, where the surly clerks would soon be stuffing my romaine lettuce and red bell peppers into white plastic bags.